You can order Delivery as Dispossession on the Oxford University Press website. It’s out now in OUP’s “Global and Comparative Ethnography” series. Use code "ASFLYQ6” for 30 percent off.
Winner: American Sociological Association Robert E. Park Award
Honorable mention: SSSP Global Division Outstanding Book Award
Reviewed in: American Journal of Sociology • Contemporary Sociology • Journal of Asian and African Studies • Journal of Labor and Society • Radical Housing Journal • Social Dynamics • Social Forces • Society & Space
Podcast appearances: Africa Is a Country • Conjuncture • New Books Network • The Paper Route
A sweeping historical and political analysis with detailed ethnographic fieldwork of the politics of everyday life in postcolonial Africa
“This pathbreaking study of the contrasting dynamics of self-organization in two Cape squatter communities opens exciting new windows in social theory. Levenson, in a close re-reading of Gramsci, challenges simplistic dichotomies between ‘civil society’ and the state, focusing instead on the dialectics of their interaction in collective struggles for housing rights. Postapartheid South Africa formally recognizes the right to decent shelter but has failed to deliver on the promise of massive new home construction for Apartheid’s victims. In the resulting environment of acute scarcity, informal settlements compete with another to articulate their demands within political space – a competition in which a crucial resource for success is the ability of squatters to achieve organic unity as ‘fused groups’.”
–Mike Davis, author of Planet of Slums
“Critically departing from the prevailing perspectives on land occupation and eviction in South Africa – such as visibility, gentrification, and public-private property type – Levenson offers a fresh and powerful outlook by bringing the state and civil society into an integral explanatory frame. He shows that the dynamics of land occupation and eviction is shaped by how the poor and the state view each other's practices. This is a lucid and engaging book informed by extensive on-the-ground research.”
–Asef Bayat, Professor of Sociology, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
“A beautifully written book about a heart-wrenching social problem: how can the ANC government, whose legitimacy rests on its promise to provide housing for all, use the logic of ‘legitimate government’ to regularly dispossess its citizens? This rigorously researched ethnography provides a rare glimpse into the logic of evictions in postapartheid South Africa. The text provides a kaleidoscopic view into the problem by showing us not only how government actors see residents but also how residents see the state. Thus, we get a rare glimpse into the way in which dispossessed communities frame and advance their claims, how these claims are seen and understood, and the complex interplay of factors that determine which communities successfully defend their rights and which the state feels authorized to deny. This highly readable and tightly argued book is a ‘must read’ for ethnographers and social theorists alike."
–Zine Magubane, Professor of Sociology, Boston College
“Zach Levenson’s book, Delivery as Dispossession, arrived this summer as an unexpected but much-needed gift….As a lucid account of the relationship between the democratic state and surplus populations, Delivery as Dispossession has taught us a great deal.”
–Ananya Roy, Professor of Urban Planning, Social Welfare, and Geography, UCLA
“Given the rich insights it provides, I expect this book to be widely read and debated by ethnographers, sociologists, and interdisciplinary scholars working with these concepts. And going forward, I expect that scholars working on the bourgeois state and civil society will have to engage with and respond to these insightful reformulations.”
–Contemporary Sociology
“Impressively clear and compelling….Levenson demonstrates the classic sociological combination of ethnographic rigor and theoretical innovation. This is ethnography at its best.”
–Social Forces
“A convincing, wonderfully grounded argument that demonstrates that political practice matters.”
–Social Dynamics
“Drawing attention to the intricacies of land occupation, Levenson’s immensely readable book opens a field for much-needed enquiry, grounded research, theorisation, debate and ultimately political conscientisation.”
–Journal of Asian and African Studies
Proposes a relational theory of the state that will appeal to scholars who work on developmental, welfare, postcolonial, and capitalist states
Provides an account of how progressive legal frameworks can demobilize activists
Based upon a decade of participant observation fieldwork in two land occupations in Cape Town
In postapartheid South Africa, nearly a fifth of the urban population lives in shacks. Unable to wait any longer for government housing, people occupy land, typically seeking to fly under the state's radar. Yet in most cases, occupiers wind up in dialogue with the state. In Delivery as Dispossession, Zachary Levenson follows this journey from avoidance to incorporation, explaining how the postapartheid Constitution shifts squatters’ struggles onto the judicial register. Providing a comparative ethnographic account of two land occupations in Cape Town and highlighting occupiers’ struggles, Levenson further demonstrates why it is that housing officials seek the eviction of all new occupations: they view these unsanctioned settlements as a threat to the order they believe is required for delivery. Yet in evicting occupiers, he argues, they reproduce the problem anew, with subsequent rounds of land occupation as the inevitable consequence. Offering a unique framework for thinking about local states, this book proposes a novel theory of the state that will change the way ethnographers think about politics.
“One cannot do justice to the intricate details of Levenson’s complex argument in a few short pages. Suffice it to say that Levenson uses his theoretical toolbox to construct a comparison of divergent outcomes. Levenson uses this comparative methodological approach to challenge deductive theorizing and its tendency to select on the dependent variable. Scholars like Howard Kimeldorf, Mark Traugott, and Jay MacLeod produced really good comparative analysis. I would add Levenson to this rarefied list.”
–American Journal of Sociology
“The book’s narrative account of the events he examined is powerful, the research is vigorous and rigorous, and his findings are important and generalizable, all of which testifies to the utility of the theoretical tools he used to conduct this study. Over all, Levenson’s argument is cogent, nuanced, and well-supported by his evidence. He also does impressively well at threading the needle of generalizing about the significance of his research findings and specifying the particularity of the people and events he engaged in a concrete time and place.”
–Journal of Labor and Society
“In this creative and critical work, Levenson offers us a challenge to move beyond prior understandings of the drivers of eviction to consider a more relational perspective.”
–Radical Housing Journal