The theoretical tenets of poststructuralism pose significant challenges to traditional ethical thinking, suggesting the need for an ethics sensitive to openness and difference. Drawing upon the work of Levinas, Derrida and Nancy, I discuss three dimensions of such an ethics: a theory of subjectivity based in a responsibility to the other; a politics of deconstruction within which this responsibility is foregrounded; and a theory of spatiality articulated in the sharing of community. This points toward an ethics of hospitality, in which the space of community is offered as a gift, and in the context of an irrecusable responsibility toward others.

In the wake of South Africa's second democratic elections, academics, researchers, and policymakers continue to contribute to the task of charting the contours of postapartheid society. At the same time, a number of scholars have been engaged in a critical reevaluation of the legacies of apartheid. This task is a crucial one for, as Aletta Norval (1995) has suggested, it is only by tracing out the particular strategies of apartheid discourse that the postapartheid order can move beyond the logics of racial and spatial difference that characterized the policies of the past. Such policies had a particularly salient impact upon the structuring of urban space in South Africa, and recent years have seen a number of studies examining the evolution and functioning of the`apartheid city'.One feature of this work has been a move away from the traditional view that the apartheid city is an exceptional case, a racist distortion of more`normal' urban processes and policies evident elsewhere in the world (Parnell, 1997). Instead, it has been increasingly recognized that local interventions in the urban environment in South Africa should be seen as part and parcel of the more general phenomenon of 20thcentury modernism (Parnell and Mabin, 1995;Thornton, 1996). One facet of this South African modernism was an increasing engagement with a discourse of urban planning, and its associated concerns with the orderly management and control of industrial growth and productivity. Thus, a number of studies have examined the emergence of apartheid urban policies in relation to the broader discourses of modernization and planning which guided the morphology of urban areas in the industrial West

No abstract

We investigate the economic geographies of streets named for Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (MLK Streets), which are an increasingly common means by which various community members across the United States are attempting to commemorate the slain civil rights leader. It is our intent to characterize these negatively "branded" spaces in order to challenge some of the common perceptions about them and inform current and future MLK Street naming debates. Copyright (c) 2007 Southwestern Social Science Association.

No abstract