Lives “on hold”: the Daily Sun and the South African identity document
the Daily Sun and the South African identity document
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
- Articles
- Submited: October 14, 2022
-
Published: October 17, 2022
Abstract
The relationship between a personal identity and the state-issued Identity Document (ID) is
the focus of this article, which examines stories published in the “Horror Affairs” column of the
popular South African tabloid, the Daily Sun. These highly emotional stories tell of the despair and
desperation felt by individuals at the lack of an ID book, which is blamed on the inefficiency of the
state Department of Home Affairs. In order to explicate this relationship I make use of Agamben’s
notion of “bare life” and the camp in conjunction with Lacan’s idea of the Symbolic Order to
argue that if the Identity Document provides the means by which the individual is made to signify,
the lack of an Identity Document threatens to reduce the individual to “bare life”. By publishing
the stories of those deprived of the visibility that the ID provides, the Daily Sun, I show, directly
engages in this exchange, and, in contrast to Home Affairs, bestows its own even stronger gift of
identity by the fact of appearance in its pages.
Article Metrics Graph
References
- Agamben, G. (1998). Homo sacer: Sovereign power and bare life. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
- Agamben, G. (2000). Means without end. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
- Breckenridge, K. (2005a). Verwoerd's bureau of proof: Total information in the making of apartheid. History Workshop Journal, 59:83-108.
- https://doi.org/10.1093/hwj/dbi008
- Breckenridge, K. (2005b). The biometric state: The promise and peril of digital government in the new South Africa. Journal of Southern African Studies, 31(2):267-282.
- https://doi.org/10.1080/03057070500109458
- Fugard, A. (2000). Township plays. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- Lacan, J. (1977). The seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI. The four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis. Trans. Alan Sheridan. London: W.W. Norton.
- Lacan, J. (1979). The four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
- Mamdani, M. (1996). Citizen and subject: contemporary Africa and the legacy of late colonialism. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
- Posel, D. (1987). Influx control, and the construction of apartheid. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- Posel, D. (2010). Races to consume: revisiting South Africa's history of race, consumption and the struggle for freedom. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 33(2):157-175.
- https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870903428505
- Rizzo, L. (2014). Visual impersonation - population registration, reference books and identification in the Eastern Cape, 1950s-1960s. History in Africa, 41:221-248.
- https://doi.org/10.1017/hia.2014.2
- South African Audience Research Foundation; All Media and Products Survey (SAARF AMPS). (2014). Retrieved 2015, September 25, from http://www.saarf.co.za/amps-readership/2014/AMPS%20DEC%2014%20-%20Readership%20Summary%20With%20NON%20PAY%20.pdf
- Sher, M. (1985). From dompas to disc: the legal control of migrant labour. In D. Davis & M. Slabbert (Eds.), Crime and power in South Africa (pp. 72-89). Cape Town: David Phillip.
- Steenveld, L. & Strelitz, L. (2010). Trash or popular journalism? The case of South Africa's Daily Sun. Journalism, 11(5):531-547.
- https://doi.org/10.1177/1464884910373534
- Wasserman, H. (2010). Tabloid Journalism in South Africa. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
- Wells, J. (1994). We now demand: the history of women's resistance to pass laws in South Africa. Johannesburg: Wits University Press.
