Reconfiguring Identities and Building Territories in India and South Africa

Contents: Acknowledgements. Introduction/Philippe Gervais-Lambony, Frederic Landy and Sophie Oldfield. I. Comparing identities and territories in India and South Africa: 1. The challenge of comparative research in geography and the social sciences/Philippe Gervais-Lambony. 2. Segregation and territory: what do we mean? a discussion in the Indian and South African contexts/Veronique Dupont and Frederic Landy. 3. Identity, space and territory in India: an anthropological perspective/M.A. Kalam. 4. Re-inscribing race and ethnicity in post-apartheid South Africa/Jane Battersby. II. Building identities and territories at national and regional scales: 5. Reflections on British imperial geography: India and South Africa/A.J. Christopher. 6. From a privileged to an unwanted minority: The Asian Diaspora in Africa/Brij Maharaj. 7. Studying urban identities in South Africa/S. Bekker, A. Leilde and C. Puttergill. 8. Entangled isolation: construction and articulation of Naga ethnicity in Indian policy/Suranjan Das. III. Reconfiguring minority identities and territories: 9. From conquest to enclosure: South African coloured minorities and their territories/François-Xavier Fauvelle-Aymar. 10. Contextualizing \'Territorial\' and \'social\' identities: historical regions and a minority community in North India/Atiya Habeeb Kidwai. 11. Land of the ancestors and territory of the Diaspora: the example of the \'Indian\' South Africans/Frederic Landy. 12. Migration of an identity: South Africans of Indian descent/Rehana Ebr.-Vally. 13. Indian territories in Durban/Helene Mainet-Valleix. 14. Building white spaces, making white minds: space and formation of \'white\' identity in \'South African former \'poor white\' areas/Annika Teppo and Philipee Guillaume. IV. Urban territory and the politics of identity: 15. Segregation and fragmentation in South African cities/Philipee Gervais-Lambony. 16. Fragmentation and access to the city: cape town and Delhi in comparative perspective/Veronique Dupont and Myriam Houssay-Holzschuch. 17. Can institutional integration help reduce urban segregation? Urban policies and the construction of local identities: some thoughts on the Johannesburg experience/Clair Benit. 18. Urban transition in South Africa: negotiating segregation/Sophie Oldfield. Contributors.

"Questions of territory, space and identity are critically important in the international geopolitical context as well as central to contemporary research in the social sciences. Processes connected with globalization have reconfigured identities and territories at multiple scales, connecting and disconnecting places in complex ways and re-enforcing old while producing new forms of segregation and polarization. Global processes meet the complex and locally specific South African and Indian geographies of inequality, expressed at national, regional and local scale. In the South African case, a political imperative to transform the legacies of racial inequality from colonials and apartheid rule underscores the centrality of racial identities. However, racial discourse and differentiation embodies and at times masks a complex mix of place-based, gender, class and cultural identities, expressed in a multi-scalar politics of territory. More than 50 years into independent rule, Indian identity politics continues to build to a large extent on caste and the intricate ways in which caste-affiliation merges with religious, socio-economic, political and place-based identities. In both contexts, the politics of identity and territory simultaneously unify and divide.

The spaces, territories and identities (re) produced in the complex contexts in which the global, national, regional and, local meet lie at the heart of the research from which the papers in this book have been generated. The research investigated the reconfiguration of Indian and South African identities and territories through dialogue primarily between geographers, but also other social scientists, from India, South Africa and France." (jacket)