Sociology Seminar Series: Annie Hikido

Postcolonial Placemaking: Race, Gender, and Township Tourism in South Africa. Since South Africa’s democratization in 1994, Cape Town has become an international tourism hotspot while its peripheral townships remain burdened by poverty and crime. Township tourism promises to bring tourists across the divide of racial segregation. Black South African women, insulted by notions of “slum tourism” and attuned to an economic opportunity, created hospitality markets by turning their township homes into bed and breakfasts and guesthouses. Some hostesses target white Westerners, the presumed consumers of township tourism, but others angle toward the greater demand from Black South African guests. Drawing from fifteen months of fieldwork over four years, I illustrate how hostesses curated multiple narratives about Black townships and the future of South Africa through their feminized service labor. Their home-spun hospitality reveals how colonial hierarchies of race, gender, and class shape imaginaries of neighborhood and national development. Through their doors, we see the precarity and promise of Black place in the afterlife of apartheid. Annie Hikido is an ethnographer who studies how race, gender, and class shape processes of urban development and globalization. She received her PhD from UC Santa Barbara and was an assistant professor at Colby College in Waterville, Maine before moving to the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. Her book, Accommodating Aspirations: Township Tourism and Postcolonial Placemaking in South Africa is forthcoming with Stanford University Press.