Border dialogues : race, class and space in the industrialization of East London, c1902-1963
This dissertation explores the local path of industrialization in the port City of East London from its emergence as the urban commercial axis of the Border Region of the Eastern Cape, to the dominance of manufacturing capitalism in its material life. The trajectory of this process between c1902 and 1963 was hesitant, uneven and contradictory, and its local economy remained marginal within South Africa, if not within the Region it critically served to help define. From the space of this marginality, a profound edge on the multiple possible routes, and ambiguities to, and in industrialization are demonstrated, and a cautionary critique of dominant 'national' and 'Randcentric' explanations offered. Employing concerns of spatiality, and of the analysis and local constructions of class and race, the separate, and inter-connected relations between the Workplaces, the Council and Municipal Administration and the Location/s are detailed. Framed within these concerns, local industrialization patterned a distinctive periodization that did not necessarily follow existing explanation, but neither did it determine alIloca1ized processes of continuity and change. These tensions between colonial, racial and class social and material spatialities and histories sedimented industrialization in a context that would remain simultaneously narrowly enabled, and dependently constrained. In this, local forms of power and knowledge, subaltern capacities and agency, and the distinct forms of space intersected in a complex web of relations of domination and subordination, and of solidarity and co-operation. These are traced through the four key periods highlighted. The dissertation can be seen to fall into these four periods tracked across the three material and social terrains, and analysed through the combined, separate and uneven racial and class forces patterned, and re-shaped in East London's process of industrialization. It concludes with the period of its transition onto the national terrains of the apartheid state's secondary phase of systemic and inclusive restructuring. Thereafter, local industrialization became integrated into a new 'national' dynamic of intervention and contradiction.
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