Post by Nicky Falkof, University of the Witwatersrand

This post is part of a partnership with the International Journal of Cultural Studies, where authors of newly published articles extend their arguments here on Antenna. 

In 2013, after 17 years of living elsewhere in South Africa and the world, I moved back to Johannesburg, the city of my childhood and adolescence, to take up a research fellowship. The place I returned to was almost unrecognisable. The oppressive late apartheid city I left has mushroomed into a pulsing metropolis, sprouting malls, migrants, security apparatus, gated communities, galleries, transport hubs and informal settlements, swelling northwards to embrace nearby towns, mutating faster that I can keep track of.

But while Johannesburg has changed in important ways, it remains in some respects oddly familiar beneath its glossy, globalised marketing. The economic and social differential between suburbs–formerly legislated as white only areas–and townships–dense, poor extra-urban zones with minimal infrastructure where black people were shifted by the apartheid government–remains extreme, despite the growing racial integration of the wealthy middle class.

Dwellers in the Johannesburg suburbs continue to be powerfully invested in the literal and imaginary boundaries of their neighbourhoods. These often charming, tree-lined streets contain little or no public space. Bodies that do not belong–in particular black male working-class bodies that are not performing physical labour–can find themselves tailed and moved on by private security companies, or characterised as criminals and plastered on community Facebook groups.

One of the clearest sites for locating the changes-that-aren’t-really-changes in suburban Johannesburg is the garden cottage, a relatively new invention. Most freestanding homes, particularly in the older northern suburbs, have one or more small outbuildings in their back yards. Many of these were shoddily constructed, with tiny windows, minimal light, raw brickwork, a steel sink and hot plate for cooking, furnished with cast-offs from the main house, perhaps with an outdoor toilet in a separate structure. This was the “maid’s room”: the place where the family’s live-in domestic worker ate, slept, cooked, washed and sometimes hid lovers, children and friends, in defiance of the so-called influx control that made it illegal for “surplus” black people to be in the cities without pass books signed by white employers.

An unreconstructed maid’s room, now used for storage, in the suburb of Melville. Photos: Aguil Lual Blunt

In the years since the end of apartheid the shape of domestic labour in Johannesburg has changed. Middle- and even working-class people of all races employ domestic workers, many of whom are immigrants from elsewhere in southern Africa, although few of these women (and occasionally men–the Malawian “houseboy” is one of Joburg’s more discomforting contemporary status symbols) live on site. This shift in the spatial and economic politics of domestic employment has freed up the space out the back and many homeowners have turned these former sites of labour exploitation into income-generating assets. Rebuilt, extended, cleaned up, furnished and often quite literally whitewashed, Johannesburg’s garden cottages are now rented out via agents and other networks.

A survey of advertisements on the popular Gumtree website reveals that these spaces are described as private, clean, safe, charming and quiet. None of these attributes would have been associated with the maid’s room which, no matter how much care its inhabitant took with it, was structurally unsuited to pleasant living. Cottage tenants are often invited to use the garden or swimming pool, once arenas of privileged whites-only leisure. The extension of access to these areas of suburban pride suggests that the person renting a cottage is discursively imagined as having equal, or close to equal, status to the homeowner, unlike the domestic worker in the cottage’s previous life, whose entry into the swimming pool would have broken a powerful social taboo. Black workers were permitted to clean the most intimate areas of white lives but were concurrently considered too dirty to use the same plates, crockery or social space.

In the middle class imaginary of 21st century Joburg, then, the garden cottage is a democratised space where people who do not own property in the suburbs can enjoy an enviable lifestyle in these quiet, leafy and (comparatively) secure environs. But this romantic idea is not borne out by the realities.

A garden cottage in Brixton, renovated and rented out on Air BnB. Photos: Zen Marie

A closer look at cottage advertising reveals a slight but unmistakable suggestion that only certain types of people are welcome in these spaces. Requests for South African passports and other documentation show an endemic mistrust of people from elsewhere in Africa that manifests violently in poorer areas of the country. Owners ask for people of “sober habits” and mention proximity to schools, religious and leisure spaces, implying that the tenants they seek are people like them, from the same communities, with the same interests, ethnic and/or economic backgrounds. Those who are allowed to live in the suburbs are expected to know the relevant codes of behaviour. Excess sound and excess people are not permitted here. Modes of township life, characterised by permeability rather than borders, communality rather than privacy, noise rather than silence, are not permissible in the suburbs, where high walls and individual property are the order of the day.

Interviews with cottage tenants compound this impression. Black people tell stories of suspicious owners who inspect their guests, set awkward rules and make them feel unwelcome in shared spaces, or of advertisers who refuse to allow them to view properties. White people talk of being interpellated into unwanted modes of kinship and the assumption that they must be the same as their homeowning landlords simply on the basis of race and class. In all these cases the apparently democratised space of the garden cottage remains subject to the classificatory urges that characterised the biopolitics of apartheid society. The boundaries of the suburb are socially policed and rules about belonging and alien-ness are retained in the 21st century city.

The dichotomy and similarity between maid’s room and garden cottage show some of the ways in which post-apartheid Johannesburg has changed, and some in which it hasn’t. Consistently contested and negotiated, these often uncomfortable spaces are a metonym of the city’s racist past and the ways in which its present, despite entry into global and continental flows of capital, culture and people, is layered on top of that painfully persistent history of separation and inequity.

[For the full article, see Nicky Falkof, “‘Out the back: Race and reinvention in Johannesburg’s garden cottages,” forthcoming in International Journal of Cultural Studies. Currently available as an OnlineFirst publication: http://ics.sagepub.com/content/early/2015/05/05/1367877915581856.abstract]

Post by Adrienne Shaw, Temple University

Having recently published a book on representation in video games, several people have asked me about the “Rust controversy” (and a blog post is easier to manage than multiple email threads). One of the more surprising findings from my book and prior audience studies projects is just how little some people (take note internet: some people) say they care about representation in games. The actual core argument of the book, however, is that media scholars (among others) need to be more attentive to when and how people come to care about representation. Looking at when and how people care about representation helps us better interrogate the limits of the kinds of diversity we have seen in games. And fights over representation, moments when people really care or militantly don’t care about representation, illustrate that really well.

So Rust… The original story broke back in March, when the post-apocalyptic massively multiplayer online (MMO) game released an update that assigned a randomly raced avatar to all players, which could not be changed. Prior to this, all the avatars looked the same: a bald white guy. Responses to this change varied. Some welcomed the injection of aesthetic diversity in the game; others were pissed. Some of this anger was expressed as racist language, some felt the change was “social justice” activism through design, and many just wanted to know how to change what the avatar looked like.

A lot of other smart people have already written about these various player reactions: go read these great pieces by Megan Condis, Kishonna Gray, and Tauriq Moosa now! I want to focus on a slightly different issue than they do however: the role the design of Rust played in helping create those negative reactions.

First, I think it’s a mistake to say that Facepunch Studios experimented here. They took an existing game and changed it pretty dramatically and suddenly. There is a long history of gamers (terminology note) reacting poorly to changes in their favorite franchises (example). Most of the coverage of Rust’s change conflates the effect of making people play as a specific avatar with changing an existing game. MMO players, especially, become really attached to their avatars; there are decades of research on this (start here). Certainly, players of Rust before this update didn’t have choices for what their avatar looked like, but now that there are appearance options I suspect players think they should have more choice (bracketing out for a moment the fair critique that they were willing to accept a default white male option, because that’s what many games typically offer). Self-representation — that is having the chance to represent yourself how you wish, whether the thing on the screen looks like you or not — is a longstanding part of MMOs. That people took the Rust change so hard, and manifested those emotions as racist chat and play behavior is unsurprising (which is not to condone the racism expressed in those comments).

Second, in my book, I talk about the distinction between characters and avatars, and in online spaces especially people are known through their avatars. Rust lead developer and owner of Facepunch Studios, Garry Newman’s comments on the matter demonstrate a misunderstanding of the contextuality of how and when what the avatar/play character embodiment affects when and how people care: “People have a strange need to play someone similar to themselves in games,” he said. “That’s not something I understand. I don’t think I’d have enjoyed Half-Life more if Gordon Freeman didn’t have glasses or a beard.” From my own research, certainly those games (narrative-driven, solo player games) are the ones in which players do not always care much about playing as a character “like them” because there are other ways (narrative mostly) for them to connect to those characters (or not). People who feel emboldened to demand things of games, moreover, do wish that on a broad level there was more diversity within those narrative-driven assigned character games. Players do often care about how they are being represented in contexts in which they are being represented to others through an avatar, like an MMO. And they really care in games that imply they have a choice, which is among the many reasons people care strongly about what relationship options are available in games.

Finally, the way the race was introduced in the game actually helped make it feel arbitrary. Indeed, in the announcement of the change they call race arbitrary: “It’s quite pleasing to see different races working together in game, and makes you realise how arbitrary race is.” Race in the game is an aesthetic addition so people can tell each other apart visually. That isn’t what race is, which is why “color-blindness” has never been an actual anti-racist goal. Robert Yang discusses his own approach to this issue in designing Cobra Club. What would be even more interesting than randomized races is if someone created a game where you are born into a body that affects the way you interact with the world. Now that would be an interesting experiment in how people react to being thrust into an identity that may not be like their own. There is a model for this in fact, in Marsha Kinder’s Runaways, and if anyone has info on what happened to that game please leave a comment.

None of this is to say that Facepunch Studios should be condemned for trying something new. New players will come to the game expecting to be assigned a body. And that’s interesting, and might lead to some unique in-game interactions that change how we understand avatar-player relationships (I sense a dissertation being formed in the distance). The danger, though, is that more risk-averse studios will see the negative response as evidence that players aren’t ready for more diversity in games. There are plenty of games out there for those players who aren’t ready for more diversity; I think the rest of us are ready for something new.

I want to offer a different reading of such incidents, one that has more to do with cynical career advancement in a post-network broadcasting era. I find it difficult to believe that long-time broadcasters (Williams, Dobbs, and Schlessinger, especially) really make such comments inadvertently. Rather, I see them as attempts to renew flagging careers and reinvent themselves for a changed media environment. In other words, I believe that many of the racially insensitive comments that broadcasters make are, in fact, quite deliberate efforts to rebrand themselves.

Granted, several of these incidents were unearthed by the left-leaning newsblog Media Matters for America, so broadcasters and their agents are not fully in control of the rebranding process. However, they can be pretty certain that, in a media environment where both professionals and amateurs are constantly “tracking” comments from politicians and commentators on the other side of the political aisle, any racist tirade will get recorded and go viral.

Of course, proving the assertion that racist rants are merely cynical rebranding strategies is difficult if not impossible. But, we can look at what happens to someone’s career in the wake of such comments, particularly at how they reinvent themselves after the controversy and the degree of financial and professional fallout they experience. Schlessinger recently signed a new contract with Sirius XM satellite radio and Williams, Dobbs, and Imus almost immediately got picked up by NewsCorp-owned outlets after news of their tirades broke. In fact, The Washington Post recently noted that Fox-owned channels have become “second-chance” outlets for indelicate commentators. Rather than understand these moves as instances of right-wing corporations seeking to influence politics, however, I believe they are driven primarily by branding: in each case, the commentator moved from more mainstream to more niche operations, which require on-air personalities with hard edges. Racist “outbursts” helped provide these otherwise somewhat banal broadcasters with such edges.

Because the Don Imus controversy took place more than three years ago, a sufficient amount of time has passed to allow us to examine the impact of the controversy on his career. Imus, in my opinion, is the prototype for this particular career strategy, but I continue to believe that his comments and their aftermath were largely accidental. Since that time, however, people like Schlessinger and Williams have quite consciously followed the trail that Imus blazed.

In the immediate wake of Imus’s comments, CBS and MSNBC cancelled their simulcasts of Imus in the Morning. Imus went on an apology tour that included Al Sharpton’s radio program and a visit with the Rutgers women’s basketball team. Within months, he was back on the air with a radio broadcast distributed by Citadel Media and a television simulcast that eventually wound up on the Fox Business Network. Since his initial outburst, Imus’s ratings have returned to their previous numbers among his core audience, male listeners 25-52, even though his overall numbers have dropped. Still, given the overall decrease in his total listeners, his ability to regain his standing among his core demographic is even more impressive. Moreover, Imus and Dobbs are now on the Fox Business Network, which serves as a kind of recruiting ground for the higher-profile Fox News Channel. Of course, Imus has supposedly gotten less “edgy,” even lecturing Juan Williams on the importance of repentance. But, I would argue that, while apologies or changes in style might help redeem a broadcaster for some listeners, for those who agree with the racist rant, these changes won’t significantly alter the broadcaster’s perceived brand.

Again, I think Imus is the accidental prototype for this racist rebranding strategy. For others—Williams, Dobbs, Schlessinger—it should come as no surprise that their tirades came at times when their careers were flagging. While each had been edgy or relevant in his or her own way in the late 1990s and early 2000s, by the end of the decade, all of them had become passé, facing declining ratings and brasher commentators with greater niche appeal. Again, let me stress that my reading of this trend is just that: a reading. However, if I am correct, we should continue to see this strategy being employed as media personalities face changed niche-media conditions and need to reinvent themselves to meet those conditions.