ABSTRACT

South Africa, a country whose economy has been in recession recently, has now been further devastated by the coronavirus pandemic. Due to the rapid decline of the middle classes and increasing poverty, the state has encountered a crisis of representation. This paper will study two initiatives that are reshaping the South African public sphere. One is community self-preservation movements that create capillaries of democratic engagement outside the conventional public sphere and challenge the traditional notion of representation; the other is the self-criticism of the middle class from which a popular politics is generated that inspires intellectuals’ participation in the struggles of the masses. The paper argues that the eventual reconfiguration of the South African public sphere relies on two outcomes: whether a new public sphere can be made out of a revived grassroots cultural network and how this new form can be connected to the conventional public sphere.

摘要

南非是一个经济最近陷入衰退的国家，如今，它被冠状病毒大流行进一步摧毁了。由于中产阶级的迅速减少和贫困的加剧，国家遇到了代议制危机。本文将研究正在重塑南非公共领域的两项倡议。第一个是社区自我保护运动，它在常规公共领域之外创造了民主参与的血统，并挑战了传统的代表制概念；另一种是中产阶级的自我批评，由此产生了一种大众政治，激发了知识分子参与群众的斗争。该论文认为，南非公共领域的最终重组取决于两个结果：