Home Spaces, Street Styles: Contesting Power and Identity in a South African City

Home Spaces, Street Styles revisits and updates some classic Anthropology: the Xhosa in Town series, which was based on research conducted in East London during the 1950s. The original studies concluded that there were two opposed responses to urbanisation in East London’s African neighbourhoods, one embracing Westernisation, European values and Christianity, and another opposed to it. They have been the subject of intense anthropological debate.

Leslie Bank returned to the areas of East London studied in the 1950s to assess how social and political changes have transformed these areas, in particular the apartheid reconstructions of the 1960s and 1970s, the struggle for liberation and the post-apartheid period in the 1990s and 2000s.

Home Spaces, Street Styles offers fresh insights into the understanding of urbanism in South Africa by exploring the relationship between social identities formation and the struggle for power and place inside the city. The book also makes a unique contribution to the analysis of the meanings of urban space, shifting between public and private spheres, as well as grappling with the complexity of gender and generational dynamics in a post-apartheid city.

Bank has added important theoretical insights to this rich ethnography, and forges strong links with issues that transcend the particularities of his urban study (Wits University Press).