Running Them Out of Time:’ Xenophobia, Violence, andCo-Authoring Spatiotemporal Exclusion in South Africa

Abstract

Immigration governance scholars often focus on formal,national regulations and how local implementation andresistance rations access to space and resources. Researchinto ‘xenophobic’ exclusion across South Africa suggestsrecalibrating research along two spatial and temporaldimensions. First, while legal and political discourse oftenevoke national principles, exclusive speech and action canbe highly spatialised and distinctly sub-national.Consequently, people objectively belonging to the same,excludable category (e.g., international migrants; sexual orethnic minorities) face varied vulnerabilities correspondingto where they work or reside. Moreover, when mobilisingnationalistic discourses of exclusion and belonging, sub-national actors customise and emplace them. Such co-authoring infuses them with particularistic interests andlanguage while imposing spatial limits on their legitimacy.This in turn generates a dynamic patchwork of regulatoryregimes where local variations may be more practicallyimportant than national policy. Second, the effects of co-authored exclusion are spatial, but their foundations maybe temporal. South Africa’s national political project restson forms of restorative justice: of building futures for thosematerially disadvantaged and disenfranchised byApartheid’s racist machinations. For South Africans, makingclaims to a future in place (i.e., in the country or a givensite) are predicated on one’s position in this national tem-poral arc. Even if apartheid disadvantaged millions acrossSouthern African, non-citizens are historiographicallyexcluded from these claims. Immigrants are, in effect, runout of time. By eliding shared pasts, officials and citizensdeny the possibility of a spatial future shared with non-nationals. These elements help explain the popular legiti-macy of anti-immigrant mobilisation and surface the multi-ple modes of citizenship and exclusion operating across thecountry. Recognising this, the article ultimately encouragesscholars to re-spatialise and temporalise the study of migra-tion governance in ways that also recognise the dialogicaldimensions of bordering and emplacement.