Retail Worker Politics, Race and Consumption in South Africa: Shelved in the Service Economy

Abstract

strating how he was also a man of the people. His desire to share his experiences and provide a good role model to younger men suffuses the text. Jeptha tells a story of pugilistic triumph, of injury, of humility, and of friendship. He responds to the loss of sight in 1907 by turning ‘to text as the form with a reach beyond his fists’ (63–64). He shows that a boxer can be a writer and a philosopher and challenges simplistic ideas that reduce the boxer to the enacter of violent masculinity. Jeptha embraced endurance as a ‘modality of the self’ and this enabled him to survive the ‘apartheid logic of engendering self-hatred’ (20). Campbell has written a complex and fascinating book. It is not an easy read because his carefully developed argument engages, at least for this reviewer, a wide range of unfamiliar traditions, abstractions, and semiotic interrogations. His willingness to make a bold argument and revisit a rare historical text, however, will interest historians and scholars of the subaltern, leisure, and sport studies.