MIGRANT PUBLICS

Liz Gunner

Professor of Anthropology

Centre for Anthropological Research, University of Johannesburg

 

Can migrants constitute publics? Drawing on Michael Warner’s notions of multiple publics (2002), I believe they can. My talk will make a case for migrant publics as plural and shifting entities, at moments material, at others, immaterial, and similarly both tangible and intangible. I will draw my evidence from Southern Africa, in particular from Johannesburg known also as ‘the city of gold’, eGoli, and focus on the figure of the insider- migrant and the migrant from without ie someone who in the course of his or her life may cross and re-cross the national border innumerable times, possibly legally and often illegally. Using Charles Briggs’ (2005) notion of ‘ideologies of communicability’ I suggest that in the Southern African context the migrant in some instances exists as a substitute category for the racial ‘other’. But I ask can one also talk of ‘ideologies of counter-communicability’? This is not a simple counter-voice but a refiguring of the power of communicable language which exists in part through the active ‘communities of voice’ and the subjectivities which radio in Southern Africa enables, particularly the vigorous and popular African language stations of the public broadcaster, the SABC. Here the intangibility as well as the tangible exist through the discourses of self-making and belonging as migrant listeners may interpellate themselves performatively as citizens through radio stations (Kunreuther 2015; Englund 2018; Gunner 2019). What happens, however, when overlapping migrant publics separate into antagonistic difference, setting the migrant insider against the migrant from without? And how is this complicated by the fact that each group may listen to a single station in a shared language? Finally, thinking how we may see migrant publics as sites of power I ask how the often hidden African languages of the city show ways of striking back against the often arrogant and hegemonic ‘communicability’ of English.

 

Professor Liz Gunner, Professor of Anthropology at the Centre for Anthropological Research at the University of Johannesburg, is the author of Sounding the Present: Radio in Difficult Times and Radio Soundings: South Africa and the Black Modern, and is the co-editor of Radio in Africa: Publics, Cultures, and Communities. She has also been a visiting scholar at SOAS, London, and the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research at the University of Witwatersrand.