ABSTRACT

Levenson's new book Delivery as Dispossession offers a careful reading of land occupations in Cape Town that takes us from landless communities in the city to courtrooms. His study focuses on two occupations in the Mitchell's Plain area with contrasting fates, which his empirically rich analysis explains in relation to the occupiers’ strategies and self-representation to the state. It is an important political sociology that contributes to how we understand the post-apartheid state and contemporary Cape Town through the inadequacies of its public housing project. It also theoretically reframes understandings of the state-subject relations in a manner that demonstrates the importance of local political organisation and the refusal of the poor to be managed as populations without political voice, as objects merely of a planning apparatus. My review essay seeks to elaborate some of its key interventions, and to pose some questions of its framing of historical continuities and changes.

摘要

Levenson 的新书 Delivery as Dispossession 仔细阅读了开普敦的土地占领，将我们从城市中的无地社区带到法庭。他的研究重点关注米切尔平原地区两种命运截然不同的占领，他丰富的实证分析解释了占领者的策略和对国家的自我表现。这是一门重要的政治社会学，有助于我们通过其公共住房项目的不足来理解后种族隔离国家和当代开普敦。它还在理论上重新构建了对国家-主体关系的理解，其方式表明了地方政治组织的重要性，以及穷人拒绝作为没有政治发言权的人口进行管理，仅作为计划机构的对象。