Journal of Namibian Studies, 13 (2013): 33 – 54 ISSN 2197-5523 (online) Copyright © 2013 Otjivanda Presse.Essen ISSN 1863-5954 (print) ISSN 2197-5523 (online) Township tourism and the political spaces of Katutura Laura Connoy and Suzan Ilcan* Abstract Contemporary postcolonial Namibia is experiencing an extension of the logic of camp biopolitics that stems from its colonial era. In this paper, the authors suggest that tourism is the conduit for this kind of development which takes on different contemporary forms in postcolonial configurations of biopolitics. In Namibia’s township of Katutura, the marginalised poor are subject to mechanisms of camp biopolitics that supplement Agamben’s conceptu- alisation of bare life. However, Agamben’s approach to biopolitics ahistoricises and depoliticises space in ways that obfuscate the presence of a political subject. The article first introduces a framework of colonialism, camp biopolitics, and tourism which is then followed by an analysis of the practice of township tourism, particularly in Katutura. The next section reveals Katutura as a political space made up of active subjects who engage in various contestations. Colonialism, camp biopolitics, and tourism Agamben’s conceptualisation of camp biopolitics is notorious and continues to provoke great controversy. Agamben argues that the fragmentation of society produces an indistinguishable grey zone between the inside and the outside, the social condition of being neither completely excluded nor completely recognised. 1 This zone is referred to as a zone of indistinction. 2 The camp is “the prototypical zone of indistinction” 3 where * Laura Connoy is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology and Legal Studies at the University of Waterloo in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. E-mail: lconnoy@uwaterloo.ca ; Suzan Ilcan is Professor in the Department of Sociology and Legal Studies at the University of Waterloo and the Balsillie School of International Affairs. She is the recent editor of Mobilities, Knowledge, and Social Justice (2013, McGill- Queen’s University Press [MQUP]) and co-author of Governing the Poor: Exercises of Poverty Reduction, Practices of Global Aid (2011, MQUP, with Anita Lacey). Her recent publications are on issues of humani- tarian and development aid, social justice and citizenship rights, and migration and mobilities. E-mail: suzan.ilcan@uwaterloo.ca 1 Giorgio Agamben, Means without End: Notes on Politics, Minnesota, University of Minnesota Press, 2000: 40. Also see William Walters, “Acts of demonstration: mapping the territory of (non-)citizenship”, in: Engin Isin and Greg Nielson, (eds.), Acts of Citizenship, London, Zed Books, 2008: 182-206 (186f.). 2 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, California, Stanford University Press, 1998.