“Questions of how belonging and exclusion occur and what is at stake in assertions of citizenship lie at the very heart of modern social life. In this trenchant critique of liberal politics and sociality, Neocosmos probes the etiology of xenophobia in South Africa, implicating the discursive practices and the historical trajectory of the State and the hegemonic language and ideology of human rights in the emergence of xenophobic anxieties. In this analysis, and the prescription of an alternative politics that follows, the resolution to forms of marginality and disenfranchisement must be initiated in a space outside of the State, in the realm of the ‘popular’ and the ‘emancipatory’.”
