From its inception, the primary focus of the field of Linguistic Landscape Studies has been the interplay between language and space, or language on display. Recently, however, scholars have begun to consider the human element of linguistic landscapes (LLs), and include the body in their work [See for example Stroud and Jegels (2014), Peck and Stroud (2015), Peck and Banda (2014)].

The thesis aims to contribute to the genre of black migrant cultural production called migritude, developed largely in African diasporic literary circles and tracing its evolution from the Négritude movement. It will mobilize Shailja Patel’s significant work to shape a new migritude that stands in continuation and contestation with the older version of this artistic project. The research question at the heart of the thesis is, what does it mean to have a migrant attitude for theatre and performance making?

This dissertation is an ethnographic study of how religious communities make and take place in Kibera, a neighbourhood that is also a homeland in the city of Nairobi. Since its establishment in 1907, the debate about who belongs in Kibera and to whom Kibera belongs has shaped how religious communities in Kibera define themselves and relate to each other.

White supremacist rule socially engineered impoverishment, dispossession and fomented brutality that black people in South Africa were made to endure through centuries of settler colonial history, which was intensified during apartheid and continued in the nearly three decades of the post ap era. Governance through attritional warfare, which actively worked to suppress and debilitate the black majority as a tactic of rule, used death, and the threat of death and disablement, to ensure white, and now also black, elites’ security.

Youth violence has been troubling the South African society ever since the country’s transition to democracy in 1994. Although the problem has been a countrywide phenomenon, certain provinces and cities, predominantly black inhabited townships in the City of Cape Town, have been most afflicted by the new form of youth violence, code-named ‘Gurans’. Cases of Gurans-related violence first appeared in the City of Cape Town’s townships around the year 2000 and have exponentially increased. Of these townships, Khayelitsha has been the most afflicted.