A Rhetorical Analysis Of Slow Violence And Spatial Amnesia Through Environmental Legislation In Post-Apartheid Era South Africa

The socio-political sphere of South Africa is deeply entrenched in the nation's history with human rights law and historic, racialized violence. Despite the abolishment of the Apartheid system in the early 1990s, effects of the regime still remain intact implicitly through the country's foundational legal documents. After making the claim that human rights and environmental rights are intrinsically bound to one another, this thesis identifies South African environmental legislation as a proponent of racialized Apartheid-esque violence. Furthermore, this thesis proves the existence of several human rights-based theories such as slow violence, spatial amnesia, and everyday violence via the examination of real-world impacts resulting from documented environmental law. This thesis uses the genre of a rhetorical analysis to unpack the verbiage used in environmental legal documents and then determine how this language functions as both a threat as well as an act of violence that impacts indigenous and historically disadvantaged communities of South Africans.