Full Description
In Predatory Welfare, Erin Torkelson explores how the direct cash transfer program instituted in South Africa revised and reworked post-apartheid racialized and gendered dispossession, despite its promise of ameliorating extreme poverty. Beginning in 2012, she focuses on how poor Black South African women asserted their entitlements to social assistance and responsibilities for familial care against the pressures of expropriation built into the grant payment system. Because the grants did not cover monthly bills, recipients were pushed into predatory loans collateralized by welfare payments. Torkelson finds that the state-sponsored but privately-run program was fundamentally undermined by its reliance on digital financial technologies which encoded wider forces of colonial rule, nationalist politics, and global development. Even when the government assumed control of grant payment in 2018, the neoliberal bent of fiscal policy continued to drive recipients into debt in new ways. Drawing on seven years of ethnographic fieldwork and organization—in grant payment queues, loan offices, grocery stores, Parliament, and the Constitutional Court—Torkelson demonstrates how cash transfers can offer a means to making racial capitalism more acceptable and how recipients can push back to demand reparation.
Contents
List of Abbreviations ix
Prologue. She's Got the Receipts xi
Introduction. Life on an Installment Plan: Separate Development in Postapartheid South Africa 1
Part I. The Cash Paymaster Services Distribution System (2012-2018)
1. Surplus People Rebooted: Debt, Development, and Difference 33
2. Bantustan Banking: Dirt Roads and Superhighways 61
3. Sophia's Choice: A Western Cape Road Map of Debt 91
4. Hellish Home Economics: Financializing the Cultural Politics of Care 124
Part II. The Post Office Distribution System (2018-2023)
5. Deserving and Undeserving Welfare States: Hegemonic Struggles Within the Ruling Party 177
6. Postal Banking: The Debilitating Effects of Public Infrastructures 177
7. Transferred Justice: Historic Debt and Future Repair 207
Conclusion. Building Solidarity Through Debt 235
Acknowledgments 243
Glossary 247
Notes 249
References 265
Index 297
