"Criminal Obsessions" - Jean Comaroff

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Real audio lecture: "This lecture explores the central place of crime in the popular imaginings, and practical lives, of South Africans after apartheid. While acknowledging that there is a significant material reality to such trauma, the paper suggests that much more is at stake: that crime and policing are key domains in which order, citizenship, race and the state are deliberated in the wake of liberation and liberalization. Above all, crime and policing are a sphere of melodrama in which state and nation construct each other—the state to assert its presence and authority upon a populace increasingly skeptical of its capacity to serve and protect. The discussion explores various forms of state theater and ritual, challenging Foucault's notion that modern power represents a move from theatrics to routine." more