Abstract
This article focuses on the new plurality of social and spatial categorizing in everyday policing and watching in urban South Africa. It is argued that the pluralization of control produces new forms of social sorting that are neither reducible to after-pains of racial apartheid nor to an often-claimed new economic segregation. By investigating different, not only state-driven, modes of observing public space, mapping hotspots, controlling bars, or identifying “intruders,” it is shown that “the will-to-see” goes hand-in-hand with a tendency to force from view. Outlined is how the interaction of these opposing logics of making visible and making invisible in the everyday policing of “crime and grime” in the coastal town of Durban can provide insights into practices of inclusion in the new South Africa.
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