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Affective politics and colonial heritage, Rhodes Must Fall at UCT and Oxford

2018; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 25; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/13527258.2018.1481134

1470-3610

Britta Timm Knudsen, Casper Andersen,

Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies

The article analyses the spatial entanglement of colonial heritage struggles through a study of the Rhodes Must Fall student movement at the University of Cape Town and the University of Oxford. We aim to shed light over why statues still matter in analyzing colonial traces and legacies in urban spaces and how the decolonizing activism of the RMF movement mobilizes around the controversial heritage associated with Cecil Rhodes at both places – a heritage that encompasses statues, buildings, Rhodes scholarship and the Rhodes Trust funds. We include a comparative study of the Facebook use of RMF as it demonstrates significant differences between the two places in the development of the student movements as political activism. Investigating in more detail the heritage politics of RMF at UCT we fledge out what we call an affective politics using non-representational bodily strategies. We argue that in order for actual social movements to mobilize in current political controversies, they need to put affective tactics to use.