lo Squaderno (Mar 2015)
Fire, (In)visibility and the Magic of the State
Abstract
What follows is a brief description of a fire that ravaged an informal settlement in the urban peripheries of Johannesburg in October 2014. What this catastrophic yet relatively prosaic event demonstrates is not only the invisibility of the urban precariat in a contemporary city of the global South, but the power of fire in producing particular forms of visibility; specifically the ways in which the state is made visible through the fire.
