Under apartheid, South Africans, both black and white, grew to think of ourselves as exceptional Africans, indeed, as exceptional human beings, a hubris the world's fascination with us only quickened.

Jonny Steinberg, The Three Letter Plague (p. 289)

Since the end of apartheid there has been a significant increase in South Africa in the incidence of xenophobic violence targeted mostly at foreign African migrants (see, for instance, Valji, 2003, p. 1; Crush and Pendleton, 2004, p. 4). The country has witnessed a tendency that has marked democratisation across the African continent, namely, the paradoxical intensification of nationalist identity politics even as the rhetoric of political liberalisation and an emphasis on the protection of human rights – along with neoliberal globalisation's preoccupation with the free-flow of goods and labour – have dominated political and economic discourse (Geshiere and Nyamnjoh, 2001, pp. 159–161). As Jean and John Comaroff put it, in South Africa, ‘a phobia about foreigners, above all from elsewhere in Africa, has been the illicit offspring of the fledgling democracy – waxing, paradoxically perhaps, alongside appeals to the African Renaissance and to ubuntu, a common African humanity’ (2001, p. 645). In May 2008, these ongoing xenophobic tensions boiled over into the most widely publicised and widespread anti-foreigner attacks to erupt since the end of apartheid.Footnote 1 During more than 2 weeks of deadly violence that started in Alexandra, Johannesburg, but soon spread across the entire country, 62 people were killed, many more were wounded or raped, while countless homes and foreign-owned business were looted or destroyed. In the end more than a hundred thousand people were displaced from their homes. For the first time since the end of apartheid, the South African government – after initially downplaying the violence – ended up deploying its armed forces to quell the unrest.Footnote 2

The shock and moral outrage that the attacks drew from some segments of the South African media and public can be explained in part as deriving from ‘the implosion of a fantasy – the fantasy of an inclusive “rainbow” nation whose citizens regard difference not merely with tolerance, but with respect’ (Hassim et al, 2008, p. 3). This moment of crisis has raised urgent questions about the terms that currently shape interactions between those considered to be South African and those viewed as outsiders; about the inherited economic inequalities and racial taxonomies that fuelled what Gqola (2008, p. 213) and Andile Mngxitama (2008, p. 198) refer to as not simply xenophobic but also ‘negrophobic’ violence, given the distinctively racialised character of the attacks; and about the responsibility of those who witnessed this violence. By way of responding to some of these questions, this article identifies recent cultural production on the topic of intra-African interactions within South Africa as an important resource for resisting the epistemic distortions that inform hostility and violence directed at those perceived as outsiders to the South African national community, a community that in itself is neither uniform nor easily identifiable, as is evidenced by the fact that a third of the people killed in the May 2008 attacks were in fact South African citizens (Hassim et al, 2008, pp. 1–2). In particular, I suggest that Adze Ugah's documentary film The Burning Man (2008) can help us to expand the terms within which migrant subjectivity is commonly conceived.

Despite the myriad xenophobic tensions that obviously tear at the post-apartheid social fabric, cultural workers such as novelists, poets and filmmakers have been relatively slow to make South Africa's crisis of hospitality the central focus of their creative projects. A few notable exceptions to this relative silence include the novels Welcome to Our Hillbrow (2001) and Going Home (2005), by Phaswane Mpe and Simão Kikamba, respectively, as well as a collection of child refugee narratives entitled The Suitcase Stories (2008), edited by Glynis Clacherty. Whereas Mpe's novel, which has come to occupy a central place in the post-apartheid literary canon, is structured as a mise en abyme of narratives, relationships, geographies and emotions that gradually open out from their local affiliations to reveal countless extra-local connections and debts, Kikamba and Clacherty's texts focus on the violently restrictive narratives of national belonging that refugees and foreigners from elsewhere in Africa have to navigate in order to survive in the contemporary South Africa that they inhabit.

Alongside these texts, cinematic production in South Africa has started to pay closer attention to the hardships and hostilities that foreigners living in South Africa confront. For instance, in a short film entitled The Foreigner, made already in 1997, director Zola Maseko explores the destructive effects of xenophobic hatred through a representation of the tender friendship that develops on the streets of Hillbrow between a foreign man, who faces constant hostility from the South African citizenry, and a homeless South African boy. Khalo Matabane's experimental feature film Conversations on a Sunday Afternoon (2005) similarly studies the realities of displacement, alienation and xenophobia experienced by foreign migrants who come to South Africa to escape the hardships of violence and war in their own countries. The film follows a fictionalised South African poet through the streets of inner-city Johannesburg as he searches for a Somalian refugee woman who made a deep impression on him during a number of Sunday talks in a park in Hillbrow. His search for this woman brings him into contact with numerous other exiles and refugees who populate the streets of Johannesburg. The documentary-style conversations he has with these people function as a meditation on the memories, stories, experiences and vulnerabilities that bind human lives together. As such, the film paints a colourful picture of the richness and complexity of migrant experience, thus indicating that social existence for these people operates along a differentiated scale of significance that cannot be defined solely in terms of the absence of legal or civil rights.

More recently, the science fiction hit District 9 (2009), directed by South African expatriate Neill Blomkamp, has allegorised the experience of segregation, forced removal and xenophobic violence in inner-city Johannesburg. The film has drawn both praise and criticism for its depiction of biopolitics in neoliberal times. Whereas some critics read its representation of human–alien relations as an astute condemnation of xenophobic violence in contemporary South Africa, others point out that the film in fact fuels negrophobic assumptions through its deeply troubling portrayal of blood-thirsty Nigerian outlaws living in Johannesburg.Footnote 3 The film drew attention particularly for the striking resemblance between its depiction of anti-alien violence and the images circulated by the South African and international media of the xenophobic violence of May 2008. Whereas District 9 was conceptualised and made before the May 2008 attacks, and engages anti-foreigner violence in a fictional, figurative register, filmmakers have also responded more directly to this particular series of xenophobic attacks:Footnote 4 on 23 May that year, a collective called Filmmakers Against Racism (FAR) was formed with the stated aim to make films that will be ‘a call for compassion and solidarity with all Africans seeking refuge and a better life in SA’ (2008). The group has since produced 9 documentaries and 12 public service announcementsFootnote 5 that address various aspects of the 2008 xenophobic attacks by privileging the personal narratives of those affected by it. The films made by the FAR collective are in a unique position to pose an ongoing challenge to the realities of xenophobia in South Africa and elsewhere in Africa in part because of the practices of production and distribution that the collective has committed itself to. The group, which is supported by the South African Screen Federation and the Independent Producers Organisation, decided collectively to have their films screened via the South African Broadcasting Corporation's (SABC) channel 1 (Ugah, 2010), where the films would reach the largest and most diverse South African viewership. They also enlisted the services of an NGO in an effort to have copies of their films distributed to community centres where public screenings in communities most affected by the violence might be organised (Ugah, 2010).Footnote 6

This article reads one of these films – The Burning Man, directed by Adze Ugah – in order to consider how cultural interventions such as these can supplement the larger project of advocating for legal and civic protections for migrants. Given that South African immigration policy in effect helps to create what Loren Landau calls the category of the ‘alien within’ (2010, p. 219) by forcing refugees, asylum seekers and other migrants to live in close proximity to the local citizenry without giving them access to legal and civic rights, the films produced by a group such as FAR are important for their capacity to challenge the xenophobic imagination. The film The Burning Man, which was given several awards by the SABC (Ugah, 2010), is particularly instructive for the way in which it articulates modes of sociality and corporeal responsibility that exceed the particularities of the bounded community of the South African nation-state.

Much like the literary texts and films listed above, The Burning Man challenges the violently parochial national imagination by engaging in vivid detail with the life narrative and bodily experience of a migrant excluded from citizenship in contemporary South Africa. In keeping with this journal's interest in the relationship between ‘body, subjectivity and world’ (Blackman et al, 2008, p. 19), this article positions the lived, affective body at the forefront of its analysis of migrant subjectivity. Resisting the temptation to read recent xenophobic violence in South Africa as simply symptomatic of the extent to which non-citizens have been reduced to ‘bare life’ (Agamben, 1998, p. 6), I interpret Ugah's film instead as an act of social recuperation in the sense that it retrieves the subjective singularity of the man who was burnt to death from the tangle of media responses and images that reduce him to an archetype of corporeal suffering. In short, the film reweaves the complex affective and inter-personal threads that constitute the experiential fabric of migrant subjectivity.

‘… for that skin was an infant's once’: restoring social life in Adze Ugah's The Burning Man

The Burning Man pays homage to Ernesto Alfabeto Nhamuave, the Mozambican man who was burned alive as a result of xenophobic riots in the township of Rhamaphosa, to the east of Johannesburg, on 17 May 2008. The image of the burning Nhamuave, crouched on his hands and knees, was splashed across the front pages of newspapers around the globe and soon became iconised as a symbol of post-apartheid xenophobic violence. Since the event of Nhamuave's death, the image has been routinely re-enlisted to accompany newspaper articles that reflect on the state of anti-foreigner attitudes in South Africa (see, for instance, Allen, 2008). The affective and symbolic force of the image has been compared to that of the photograph of a dying Hector Pieterson after he was shot by the apartheid riot police during the 1976 Soweto uprisings (Knol, 2008).Footnote 7 As such, the image feeds into a larger, newly reflexive, national and international narrative about contemporary South Africa that is marked by an attitude of growing irritation with the post-apartheid pre-fixation on social and economic equality yet to be achieved.

The newspapers that initially published the image were unable to identify Nhamuave as the subject of the photograph: his body was so badly disfigured that it took the South African police 2 weeks before they could make a positive identification (Bevan, 2008). Even though newspaper images, by virtue of their mass circulation and general ephemerality, commonly invite a measure of detachment from their viewers, the cruel human suffering depicted in the image arguably disrupts any attempt on the part of viewers to establish a comfortable emotional distance from it. In fact, it is the visceral spectatorial intimacy that the image demands that stands at the forefront of Ugah's documentary inquiry. If the pain of the burning man captured in the image operates as a sign that requires a response from those who witness it, Ugah's film asks how such a response might translate a crude ‘politics of atrocity’ (Humphrey, 2002, p. 1) – that is, a politics deployed by Nhamuave's attackers ‘to engender horror and to disrupt confidence in a normative reality’ (p. 1) – into a narrative about restored social life and intercultural responsibility.

By means of a subjective documentary style that shows the filmmaker to be closely involved with his subject, the film fleshes out the singular life narrative of a man reduced to a symbol not only by his killers – who presumably saw him as simply embodying all that could be considered foreign and threatening to the South African citizenry – but also by the media subsequently responsible for the iconisation of his anonymous corporeal pain. In the same vein, the film addresses the larger biopolitics of belonging that led to the man being ‘institutionally and socially excluded from legal protection’ (Landau, 2008, p. 2) in post-apartheid South Africa, thus speaking to Landau's claim that, in recent years

South Africa has de facto suspended elements of its normal legal order vis-à-vis refugees, asylum seekers, and undocumented migrants through both commission and (more regularly) omission. Under these circumstances, the right to life ceases to be delimited by constitutional principles. Rather, [… these people] are not only subject to the states’ unbridled and potentially arbitrary power but also, by forfeiting their identity as legal beings, their lives and livelihoods exist at their neighbours’ whim. (pp. 2–3)

The film's introduction positions Nhamuave's narrative firmly against the backdrop of the ‘dialectics of flow and closure’ (Meyer and Geschiere 1999, passim) that typify intra-African mobilities under neoliberal conditions, namely, the dual inclination to fetishise the opening of borders to facilitate the flow of people, capital and goods, on the one hand, and ‘the tenacity of the nation-state as a model that imposes boundaries and a tendency toward protectionism’ (Geshiere and Nyamnjoh, 2001, p. 161), on the other. The title sequence of the film juxtaposes two scenes: a medium long shot of bustling human traffic in a crowded urban environment marked by movement, human proximity and anonymity; and a long shot of a solitary man whose fading image is superimposed onto a rural Mozambican sunset. The first of these scenes is preceded by a slide upon which the following letters are scripted: ‘Every year … thousands of people from neighbouring countries stream into South Africa in search of work and a better life’. The scene of the lone walking man is preceded, in turn, by a similar slide inscribed with the following words: ‘Ernesto Alfabeto Nhamuave was one of them. Husband to Hortência Nhamuave and father of three’.

The juxtaposition of these two scenes evokes a number of connotations vis-à-vis political and social membership in contemporary South Africa. For one, it signals the anonymity that accompanies mobility in an era in which human singularity is subsumed within essentialist identity politics, exclusionary ideas of citizenship and the accompanying urge to reduce opportunity-seeking (im)migrants from divergent backgrounds to labels such as ‘outsiders’, ‘strangers’ or Makwerekwere, as in the case of foreign black Africans living in South Africa (Nyamnjoh, 2006, pp. 28–81). Furthermore, the fading, spectral figure of Nhamuave, which serves as the counterpoint to the opening scene of group anonymity, represents both the literal death of this man at the hands of the lynching mob and the precarious condition of spectrality occupied by non-citizens who are caught up, to paraphrase Seila Benhabib (2008) in her work on cosmopolitanism, in the tension between a universalist humanist ethics that is meant to recognise the equal dignity of all persons inhabiting this planet, and the particularity of laws that depend for their implementation and enforceability on the institutions and interests of specific States. This condition of spectrality is reflected in Hannah Arendt's contention that one cannot live a fully human life in the absence of ‘the right to have rights’ (1958, p. 296). What she means by this is that a person's loss of political and legal status – typical of the position occupied by the stateless person – results basically in that person's ‘expulsion from humanity altogether’ (p. 297). ‘Not the loss of specific rights’, she explains, ‘but the loss of a community willing and able to guarantee any rights whatsoever, has been the calamity which has befallen ever-increasing numbers of people. Man [sic], it turns out, can lose all the so-called Rights of Man without losing his essential quality as man, his human dignity. Only the loss of a polity itself expels him from humanity’ (p. 297). The distinction that Arendt makes here is similar to the opposition between ‘bare life’ and ‘politically qualified life’ (Agamben, 1998, p. 7) that Giorgio Agamben reads as foundational to the functioning of the modern State (Agamben draws this distinction from the ancient Greek terms zoē, namely, ‘the simple fact of living common to all living beings’, versus bios, ‘a qualified life, a particular way of life’ (p. 1)). Following Foucault, Agamben reads the ‘politicization of bare life’ as the ‘decisive event of modernity’ (p. 4) in the sense that, for the first time, natural life becomes the focus of the calculations and regulations of State power. Bare life, which Agamben further defines as the ‘life of homo sacer (sacred man), who may be killed and yet not sacrificed’ (p. 8), is ‘included in politics in the form of the exception, that is, as something that is included solely through exclusion’ (p. 11). Agamben in other words conceptualises the production of bare life – similar to Arendt's ‘expulsion from humanity’ – not merely as the result of the loss of membership in a polity but rather as one of the foundational rights of inclusion by means of exclusion granted to the modern sovereign State.Footnote 8

In the specific South African context that Ugah addresses in his film, the liminal figure of homo sacer – of ‘pure subjection and gross biological being’ (Comaroff, 2007, p. 209) – seems to be recognisable in its most chilling form in the way in which Nhamuave meets his death. Some might read Nhamuave as having been partly condemned even before the xenophobic attacks to what Orlando Patterson, in reference to slave subjectivity, referred to as ‘social death’ (1982, p. 32), namely, the figurative death of a person deprived of social life which precedes that person's actual physical death. His social death is figured in this film largely as a form of ‘alienated labour’, to use Marx's terminology. This is made apparent, for instance, in a scene included in the film's title sequence, in which images of the soulless technologies of industrial labour are accompanied by the following subscript: ‘He worked 7 days a week on construction sites for R250 a week’ (to get a sense of how low this amount is, consider for instance that it costs more or less R400 to fill a tank of petrol in South Africa, or that a hamburger at the Wimpy Bar, one of the country's most affordable restaurants, costs approximately R21.95). That the man occupied this alienated social space is reflected also in interviews the filmmaker has with Nhamuave's neighbours, who describe him as a ‘quiet man’ who did not ‘have many friends’ and was seemingly caught up in an endless ‘go to work, go to sleep’ cycle. Aside from his brother-in-law Francisco who lived and worked with him (and who was also targeted by the xenophobic mob that killed Ernesto), he was mostly deprived of immediate social and familial support. As a migrant worker in South Africa, Nhamuave thus at first glance seems to fit the role of homo sacer in the sense that his life seems to have been mostly stripped of social value.

Yet tempting as it might be to read Nhamuave as a paradigmatic figure of homo sacer, such a reading also has its shortcomings. As Jean Comaroff (2007) puts it, Agamben's allegory of ‘the purgatory of homo sacer’

… moves by way of a very limited set of archetypes and metaphors – the ban as originary political act, the production of bare life as the threshold from nature to culture, the camp as hidden matrix – to which the making of all modern politics is reduced. […] it hovers ambiguously between metaphysics and history. While this species of ambiguity can be highly suggestive, it can also, when applied literally to circumstances in the world, lead to oversimplification. (pp. 208–209)

Ugah's documentary explicitly addresses the need to counter the condition of facelessness and abjection that has been violently imposed on Nhamuave not only by his attackers, but also previously by the international labour market and subsequently by the media. It would thus be rash to use the allegorising terms offered by Agamben if one were interested in restoring Nhamuave's life to the order of socially valued existence. This is especially the case in light of the documentary's clear concern with social recuperation, that is, with remapping the affective relations that gave meaning to Nhamuave's life, with countering the epistemic distortions that made possible the erasure of these socially and emotionally significant relations, and with calling attention to the web of responsibility into which those who witnessed his painful death have been drawn. As such, the documentary provides confirmation of Comaroff's suggestion that, ‘while the will to power or the effects of structural violence might significantly sever life from civic protection and social value, no act of sovereignty – save perhaps in the fantasies of philosophical absolutists or biological determinists – can actually alienate humans from entailment in webs of signs, relations, and affect’ (p. 209).

In short, to read someone like Nhamuave as confined to a state of permanent exception is to risk undervaluing the complex experience of being subjected. In their 2008 editorial, the managing editors of Subjectivity highlight the important distinction between the subject and subjectivity, where the former generally signals a ‘produced form, the outcome of a complex constellation of textual, material, institutional, historical factors’ (Blackman et al, 2008, p. 8) and the latter broadly concerns ‘the experience of the lived multiplicity of positionings’ (p. 6). The editors point out that the subject is too frequently approached as a derivative form ‘wholly accounted for by power, discourse and historical circumstances’ (p. 9). They point out that such a view fails to leave room for ‘anything self-defining or distinctive about this subject itself’ (p. 8). Responding to various disciplinary shifts in subjectivity studies, the editors instead promote theoretical considerations that, while attending to the weight of power, discourse and history, might also begin to illuminate the ‘unique density and complexity of subjectivity which is always more than a derivative formation’ (p. 10). In trying to move beyond the reductionism of a ‘bare life’ account of migrant subjectivity in contemporary South Africa, this article in effect responds to this journal's interest in subjectivity as a ‘force for making worlds that is indefinable and undecidable, a process that is incompatible with any notion of predetermination, transcendence, or timelessness’ (p. 16).

In line with these interests, I read The Burning Man as a film about some of the affective, bodily complexities that gave Nhamuave's life its unique subjective and social integrity. The film considers the varied intersubjective connections, intimacies, vulnerabilities and responsibilities that characterise Nhamuave's links to family, to the filmmaker and ultimately to the viewer and witness to his suffering. The documentary moves from its opening sketch of the specific circumstances of Nhamuave's death into a gradually broadening consideration of the various filial and a-filial relationships that textured the man's social world during his lifetime. Even though the film at times fuels hetero-patriarchal anxieties about the ways in which migration and xenophobic violence disrupt the nuclear family – as the filmmaker's gender-biased language and repeated reference to Nhamuave as family man and breadwinner indicate – it nonetheless does valuable recuperative work by reanimating the life of a foreign migrant with social and familial significance, and by reflecting on the distinctiveness of a life routinely subjected to overdetermining political, social and economic forces.

The diegesis first situates him in a community of neighbours in Rhamaphosa township before moving to the rural village in Mozambique where Ernesto was born to explore his relationship with his extended family, for, as the filmmaker explains in his voice-over narration: ‘If I was to learn anything about him […] I had to go to his family and meet the people he loved and the people that loved him back’. Ugah travels to the rural landscape of Homoine, a small district in Inhambane province, where he populates Nhamuave's retrospective life narrative with the memories and emotional attachments that family members and acquaintances cling to in the aftermath of his death. Through interviews with the man's grieving friends and relatives, including his children, his sister Philomena, his wife Hortência and his brother-in-law Francisco, Ugah embeds Nhamuave's life within larger networks of cultural continuity and memory. He is careful to point to the man's ancestral and affective links to place, as when his children explain that one of their favourite play-spots is in the shade of the same tree that their father liked to sit under, or when he is buried alongside his ancestors.

Aside from these cultural and filial links, the first-person narration points to the filmmaker's own relationship of cultural proximity to Nhamuave by establishing the intersections between their respective life-trajectories. As a Nigerian who came to South Africa in 2004 ‘also in search of a better life’, Ugah finds himself personally connected to Nhamuave's ordeal, which he believes could well have been his own. While in Mozambique, Ugah repeatedly identifies similarities between his own Nigerian village and that of Nhamuave's family. Aside from pointing to the need for greater intra-African solidarity in the face of existing hostilities between nationals from elsewhere on the continent, these connections are made by way of disrupting notions of journalistic detachment, thus establishing Ugah as involved witness to the violence inflicted on the man. The responsibility of the witness is underscored also in a montage sequence of explicit newspaper images of the burning Nhamuave included in the early part of the film, accompanied by Ugah's articulation of the emotional demands made on him by these images: ‘At one point, I found myself staring at the pictures, daring to contemplate what it must have felt like for that fellow to be engulfed by those flames. I could not bear the thought’.

The images bring both Ugah and the viewer face-to-face with the limits of recognition, even as they highlight the need to engage with what Sara Ahmed has called the ethics of responding to the pain of another (2004, pp. 28–31). As Ahmed explains, ‘[t]he impossibility of feeling the pain of others does not mean that the pain is simply theirs, or that their pain has nothing to do with me. […] an ethics of responding to pain involves being affected by that which one cannot know or feel’ (p. 30; see also Scarry, 1985, p. 4). Moreover, ‘the ethical demand [of witnessing another's pain] is that I must act about that which I cannot know, rather than act insofar as I know’ (p. 31). The filmmaker thus rehumanises Nhamuave both by redrawing the lines of social and familial affect that were erased by his killers, and by pointing to the responsibility of the witness to his death.

By acknowledging the limits of his capacity to comprehend the singular subjective experience of Nhamuave's painful death even while he takes up the necessary but inevitably impossible task of narrating this pain, Ugah engages in what Kelly Oliver has referred to as witnessing ‘beyond recognition’ (2001, p. 6). Oliver reads the notion of recognition as it is used in contemporary critical theory as problematic for a number of reasons, including the fact that those who occupy the position of the othered do not simply struggle to be recognised, but are also seeking witnesses to experiential, epistemological, emotional and sensory realities that are beyond recognition. If only that which is familiar can be recognised, subjective difference will always be assimilated into something familiar: ‘Only when we begin to think of recognition of what is beyond recognition can we begin to think of the recognition of difference’ (p. 9). Oliver identifies this revised model of subjectivity with the process of witnessing, which she conceptualises in terms of the ‘[a]ddress-ability and response-ability’ (p. 7) of subjects in intersubjective relations. This new model is one that ‘does not ground identity in hostility towards others but, rather, one that opens onto the possibility of working-through hostilities’ (p. 11). The ethical obligation contained in the work of witnessing rests upon the knowledge that we need to be response-able to others even as we acknowledge the limits of our own capacity to fully know their sensory, emotional and experiential worlds.

The film The Burning Man is openly reflexive both about the impossibility of knowing the other's pain, and about the importance of ‘working through’ intersubjective hostilities by trying to formulate an ethical response to this pain despite the epistemological and affective difficulties that trouble the process of witnessing. Moving beyond a simplistic economy of recognition, the filmmaker calls attention to the complexities of inter-affective identification in a political context that is circumscribed by what Charles Mills might call epistemologies of ignorance (1997, p. 18). Such forms of deliberately produced ignorance permit those in positions of assumed superiority to remain both wilfully and at times unconsciously blind to injustice and to the cruelties inflicted on marginalised bodies. Xenophobic hatred similarly thrives on epistemologies of ignorance that make it possible to evict non-national bodies from the realm of full personhood and grievability, to draw on Judith Butler's important formulation (2004, pp. xiv–xv). By drawing attention to the role of the witness, Ugah's film makes it possible to extend responsibility beyond those directly guilty of inflicting physical violence and to consider some of the broader epistemic, economic and historical forces that feed into such violence.Footnote 9

The film ends with Ugah's narration of the following lines from a poem by Margie Orford, entitled ‘A Meditation on South African Citizenship’:

If being a South African means hanging over my garden fence and watching the smooth skin of a man blister as he burns a live, then I am a foreigner.

For that skin was an infant's once, caressed by a mother's marvelling hand.

That skin is a man's, and a lover's hand passed over it, marvelling at its smoothness. That skin is a father's, reached for in the night by a child afraid of the dark.

That burning skin was a man's and if being a South African means I cannot feel that skin as my own

Then I am a foreigner. (Orford, 2008)

These lines, which are accompanied by a montage sequence of alternating images of violated bodies and of those who presumably witness this violence, highlight the necessity for South Africans to anchor their engagement with African immigrants and other foreigners in narratives of shared corporeal vulnerability to the vicissitudes of daily living under the conditions created by neoliberal economic policies reflected on elsewhere in the documentary. By pointing to the shortcomings of definitions of South Africanness that are grounded in a violently xenophobic world-view, Orford's poem narrates new modes of affective and bodily sociality that aim to transcend the limits of local and nationalist self-imagining. Articulated in terms of an ethics of human interdependence and responsible interpersonal interaction, the lines form a crucial part of Ugah's recuperative project in the sense that they draw out some of those intersubjective ties – including the intimacies shared by romantic partners, mothers, fathers and children – that give social and emotional value to human life. The film suggests, in short, that the bodily dignity of those barred from political membership in contemporary South Africa is inseparable from that of those who wield the power to exclude, to paraphrase a point made by Njabulo Ndebele in a different context (2007, p. 137), thereby demonstrating an ethics of corporeal response-ability to be key to the economic and psychological survival of both local South Africans and Africans from elsewhere. By concluding with Orford's sketch of the ways in which bodies affect each other in moments of intimacy and of violence, Ugah's documentary positions the animate, sensory body at the heart of social life. Such a focus on bodily agency supports what the editors of this journal identified as a re-introduction, in recent years, of the ‘the actual fleshy body of skin, muscle, tendons, synapses and blood’ (Blackman et al, 2008, p. 18) into studies of subjectivity. More to the point, the film's emphasis on Nhamuave's corporeal, affective subjectivity troubles philosophical narratives of migration that fail to account for ‘the concrete particulars of lived experience’ (p. 19).

Conclusion

Given that human mobility associated with economic globalisation has generated a vast and ever-mutating array of legal, political and other technologies of exclusion in recent years, and that access to political and civic rights is typically circumscribed even for those with formal territorialised citizenship, analyses of migrant subjectivity require conceptual tools that move beyond the simplistic division of humanity into politically qualified existence and bare life. As Aihwa Ong suggests, ‘Agamben's fundamental reference of bare life in a state of permanent exception […] ignores the possibility of complex negotiations of claims for those without territorialized citizenship. […] Agamben seems to preclude the possibility of non-rights mediation or complex distinctions that can buttress claims for moral protection and legitimacy’ (2006, p. 23). The blanket category of ‘bare life’ further overlooks complex differences – including of racial and gendered positioning – among those who might otherwise be said to live in a state of legal or sovereign exception. Those most likely to perpetrate acts of anti-foreigner violence in South Africa are also most likely to be, as Mngxitama phrases it, ‘the excluded of our democracy’ (2008, p. 195). Yet to simply point to the respective perpetrators and victims of xenophobic violence as inhabiting a shared state of sovereign exception does not help us to understand the negrophobic character of xenophobia in contemporary South Africa, for instance, nor the gendered nature of claims to national belonging that are made by way of ‘protecting’ local women from foreign men (Gqola, 2008, p. 218).

Such a limited view of specifically migrant experience also fails to recognise the complex cultural and political work done by filmmakers such as Ugah, who arguably engages in a representational form of ‘abject cosmopolitanism’ (Nyers, 2003, p. 1072) – namely, the ‘emerging political practices and enduring political problematics associated with refugee and immigrant groups resisting their targeted exclusion’ (pp. 1072–1073) – by disputing the terms in which non-national subjectivity gets cast within the popular xenophobic imagination. Ugah's film also complements work done recently in the field of migration studies that reads migration not simply as a response to various forms of social control or socio-economic deprivation, but as a conveyor of the affective and potentially transformative experiential complexities of diversely positioned subjectivities on the move. A recent special issue of this journal on the topic of mobility and migration, for instance, insists on the need to move beyond theories that conceive of migration only in terms of subjection; instead, guest editors Andrijasevic et al, suggest that a consideration of the everyday actions of migrants might reveal complex forms of political agency (2009, p. 366). In a similar vein, Papadopoulos et al invert approaches to migration that focus solely on the terms and categories of sovereign and other forms of exclusion. They insist, instead, that migration be regarded as autonomous, that is, not as ‘[derivative] of social, cultural and economic structures [… but as] a constituent creative force which fuels social, cultural and economic transformations’ (2008, p. xviii). Such an understanding of migration underlines migrant agency and makes it possible to ‘investigate the genesis of the present from the perspective of mobility instead of the perspective of its control’ (p. 203). Such a theoretical shift also defies any attempt – on the part of journalists, academics and xenophobic agitators alike – to erase the dense affective and social networks that characterised the embodied experience of a migrant such as Ernesto Nhamuave.