Book review

In this illuminating study on the everyday politics of South Africa’s communities on the fringes of society, Kerry Ryan Chance shows how the social relations of fire, water, land, and air intimately connect to power. These elements produce and regenerate energies that fuel the occurrences of different theories related to both natural and man-made events. In five chapters and a conclusion, the author analyzes how the impoverished residents of these communities collectively identify, employ strategies of resistance, define their material lives, and finally articulate how they conceive of democracy as a lived concept (18). Chance brings this story and its intersecting narratives together with a combination of observations (participant, hall, semi-furnished groups, interactions between officials and residents) and interviews. Each chapter opens with a dispatch that sets the stage for the portrayal of the inner lives and everyday struggles of the shack dwellers who fight for basic social services in South Africa’s densely populated, unelectrified, and waterstrapped shack settlements in the popular touristic cities of Cape Town and Durban. Chance shows the division between urbanmigrants and state agents, and their formal organization Abahlali. Abahlali serves as part of the poor people’s networks. It launches campaigns on behalf of foreign militants who engage in living politics to “[transmute] the boundaries between the home and the streets to make the poor seen and heard in the city through means that residents ground in their own communities and contrast to expert, elite, or technical languages of formal state institutions” (17). Readers are drawn into the plights of these urban dwellers and how their access to electricity and other social services turns into racialized politics that continue to divide and stratify the haves and the have nots. The distinction between social classes clearly emerged when the state installed prepaid electricity boxes in Durban’s Kennedy Road shacks for those who possessed jobs and could afford to pay (39). In spite of their lack of citizenship and their illicit connections to social services, the mute speak by using press releases,