Unlearning Comparative Politics in South Africa and the USA

• In Event: Toward a Spacious Comparative Politics: Knowledge Production & Outsiders Within

Abstract

I have been an outsider-within comparative politics since entering the field in the late 1990s. Early experiences of raced-gendered hypervisibility, immersion in Global Minority-centric curricula, and violent knowledge policing provided an education in how difference hierarchies shape comparative political science as well as the polities we study. Encountering unruly, anticolonial, and reflexive comparativists whose scholarship challenges these hierarchies has kept me partly within comparative, as has my continued interest in the interplay between marginalized people and the state. These comparativists’ interventions inform my scholarship on the state, democracy, and governance in southern African rural politics as does a commitment to reflexivity in the discipline and the field. Studying Black rural people’s efforts to secure greater benefit from wildlife tourism and Black women’s involvement in traditional governance has underscored the critical importance of local governance institutions and illuminated how colonial racing-gendering shapes the putatively democratic South African and Botswanan states in complex ways. Comparative political science needs to attend to marginalized knowledges and perspectives to understand our political world and respond to the present moment.

Author

• Robin L. Turner, Butler University