Julius Malema and the postapartheid public sphere
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Date
2014
Authors
Posel, Deborah
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
University of the Free State
Abstract
Julius Malema has been one of the most prominent and controversial public figures
in post apartheid South Africa. This article examines his impact within the post
apartheid public sphere as a space of spectacle. Working with a notion of the
public sphere as constituted through a hybrid of rational and affective modes of
communication, the article shows how a politics of spectacle articulated commercial
and cultural changes in the country’s mass media after 1994. This confluence shaped
Malema’s public persona and impact on the terms of public debate during his tenure
as president of the ANC Youth League. The angry, unruly bad boy of post apartheid
politics, Malema’s racial populism provoked garrulous public talk, often with far
more heat than light, and traversed by racist invective that the earlier years of public
dialogue had largely held at bay; yet he also exposed the force of old and emergent
fault lines in the new social order more directly and acutely than many others have
done. I argue that, symbolically, Malema entered the public sphere as a counterpoint
to Nelson Mandela unsettling the iconography of non racialism, reasserting an angry
and confrontational version of race that reinstated the spectre of violent conflagration
that Mandela’s ‘miracle’ held at bay.
Description
Keywords
Malema, Julius, Post-apartheid, Public opinion
Citation
Posel, D. (2014). Julius Malema and the post-apartheid public sphere. Acta Academica: Special issue: Rethinking the publics, 46(1), 32-54.