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Gangs, politics & dignity in Cape Town / Steffen Jensen.
Van Pelt Library DT1768.C65 J46 2008
Available
- Format:
- Book
- Author/Creator:
- Jensen, Steffen.
- Language:
- English
- Subjects (All):
- Colored people (South Africa)--South Africa--Cape Town.
- Colored people (South Africa).
- Colored people (South Africa)--South Africa--Cape Town--Social conditions.
- Colored people (South Africa)--Government policy--South Africa--Cape Town.
- Poor--South Africa--Cape Town--Social conditions.
- Poor.
- Poor--Government policy--South Africa--Cape Town.
- Gangs--South Africa--Cape Town.
- Gangs.
- Police-community relations--South Africa--Cape Town.
- Police-community relations.
- Poor--Government policy.
- Social conditions.
- Colored people (South Africa)--Government policy.
- South Africa--Cape Town.
- Physical Description:
- xi, 212 pages, 8 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations, maps ; 23 cm
- Other Title:
- Gangs, politics and dignity in Cape Town
- Place of Publication:
- Oxford : James Currey ; Chicago : University of Chicago Press ; Johannesburg : Wits University Press, 2008.
- Summary:
- This vivid study of the day-to-day experience of living in a working-class neighbourhood on the Cape Flats deals with issues of criminality and the search for dignity in a harsh, economically depressed urban landscape.
- Gangs are the main focus of this study, but gang members are presented on a broader canvas as family members, neighbourhood friends, members of sports clubs, employees. Within this intensely claustrophobic world devout Christians and Muslims, drug dealers, cops, gangsters and welfare workers all rub shoulders.
- Despite being disempowered in many ways mothers are hugely important figures in 'the Courts', commanding respect within the family and even from gang members. Criminality is a blurred concept in the township, where alternative and competing moral codes have emerged.
- Central to this analysis is the complicated and diverse concept of dignity. How is it constructed? What is its basis? How does it differ among the various protagonists of the township?
- Contents:
- The production of subjects & spaces
- The violence of the 'other side'
- The back streets
- Winning back the Cape Flats
- Policing the Cape Flats
- Politics of respectability
- Negotiating masculinities.
- Notes:
- Includes bibliographical references (pages 199-209) and index.
- ISBN:
- 9780226398334
- 9780226398358
- 0226398331
- 0226398358
- OCLC:
- 225846809
- Online:
- Contributor biographical information
- Publisher description
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