Making sense of South Africa’s brand of xenophobia: affect and the politics of viscerality

This article deploys Achille Mbembe’s notion of the politics of viscerality and Sara Ahmed’s theorisation of affect to analyse the use of affect against immigrants by South African politicians and vigilante groups in media stories and in a documentary titled ‘Fear and Loathing in South Africa’ which was released by the BBC on 18 September 2023. The media stories were covered by major newspapers and social media platforms in South Africa, and were, thus, purposively selected based on their salience. Close reading was used as method to examine how politicians and vigilante groups mobilise(d) affect to justify the use of violence against African immigrants. The study was guided by the following questions? What do stories of immigrants living in South Africa tell us about the logics of xenophobia and its affective currency? How does the film ‘Fear and Loathing in South Africa’ depict the political economy of affect and how it is mobilised to villify immigrants. I argue that media stories and the film ‘Fear and Loathing in South Africa’ represent hate, anger and fear as powerful emotions that anti-immigrant groups mobilise to create and amplify binaries between citizens and immigrants, thus casting the latter as permanent ‘outsiders’.