‘Running Them Out of Time:’ Xenophobia, Violence, and Co-Authoring Spatiotemporal Exclusion in South Africa

Immigration governance scholars often focus on formal, national regulations and how local implementation resistance rations access to space resources. Research into ‘xenophobic’ exclusion across South Africa suggests recalibrating research along two spatial temporal dimensions. First, while legal political discourse evoke principles, exclusive speech action can be highly spatialised distinctly sub-national. Consequently, people objectively belonging the same, excludable category (e.g., international migrants; sexual or ethnic minorities) face varied vulnerabilities corresponding where they work reside. Moreover, when mobilising nationalistic discourses of belonging, sub-national actors customise emplace them. Such co-authoring infuses them with particularistic interests language imposing limits their legitimacy. This in turn generates a dynamic patchwork regulatory regimes variations may more practically important than policy. Second, effects co-authored are spatial, but foundations temporal. Africa’s project rests forms restorative justice: building futures for those materially disadvantaged disenfranchised by Apartheid’s racist machinations. For Africans, making claims future place (i.e., country given site) predicated one’s position this arc. Even if apartheid millions Southern African, non-citizens historiographically excluded from these claims. Immigrants are, effect, run out time. By eliding shared pasts, officials citizens deny possibility non-nationals. These elements help explain popular legitimacy anti-immigrant mobilisation surface multiple modes citizenship operating country. Recognising this, article ultimately encourages re-spatialise temporalise study migration ways that also recognise dialogical dimensions bordering emplacement.