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Introduction: Reading Post-Apartheid Whiteness
... One aspect of gender regimes in South Africa is the persistence of heteronormativity. Under colonial and apartheid rule, patriarchal structures were reinforced and maintained, as power was concentrated in the hands of white males to uphold white, heteronormative family structures (Carolin et al., 2020). The rigid gender roles and expectations that emerged from these systems served to maintain social control and reinforce racial hierarchies. ...
Background: Scholars researching the issues of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and other sexual and gender minorities (LGBT) are being denounced as performers of ‘dirty’ work and promotors of ‘immorality’. Such scholars face obstacles in the workplace, such as difficulties in obtaining ethical approval, scarcity of funding, bullying, denial of promotion and unacknowledged scholarship, among other struggles.Objectives: This article intends to highlight the unintended, unanticipated and often overlooked impact that certain LGBT research interests have on the professional and personal identities of the scholar.Method: This exploratory qualitative study uses a reflexive dialogical single case study approach to understand how Katlego (a pseudonym), a cisgender heterosexual researcher, is affected by his interest in LGBT studies. Continuous supervision notes that enable thoughtful reflexive practice in qualitative research shaped the basis of this article.Results: This article shows how Katlego’s LGBT research interest resulted in him being policed, his professional intentions questioned, his bodily expression scrutinised and personal conflict being blamed on his allegedly ‘disgraceful’ research interest. Furthermore, it demonstrates how the conflation of Katlego’s interest in LGBT research with pervasive negative assumptions of non-heteronormative sexual orientations, gender identities and expressions has resulted in a shift in his professional and personal identities.Conclusion: This article calls for awareness of the issues faced by all researchers interested in LGBT research and support strategies for navigating the professional identity, workplace environment and social ecologies within a frowned-upon research field. Failure to do so could compromise their career trajectory, well-being and safety in compulsory heterosexual environments.Contribution: This article illustrated how gender regimes position the researcher as an active creator of knowledge; therefore, the research process experiences can neither be made invisible nor neutralised. Researchers must overtly consider and prepare for situational and unanticipated ethical issues.
... One aspect of gender regimes in South Africa is the persistence of heteronormativity. Under colonial and apartheid rule, patriarchal structures were reinforced and maintained, as power was concentrated in the hands of white males to uphold white, heteronormative family structures (Carolin et al., 2020). The rigid gender roles and expectations that emerged from these systems served to maintain social control and reinforce racial hierarchies. ...
Background: Scholars researching the issues of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and other sexual and gender minorities (LGBT) are being denounced as performers of ‘dirty’ work and promotors of ‘immorality’. Such scholars face obstacles in the workplace, such as difficulties in obtaining ethical approval, scarcity of funding, bullying, denial of promotion and unacknowledged scholarship, among other struggles. Objectives: This article intends to highlight the unintended, unanticipated and often overlooked impact that certain LGBT research interests have on the professional and personal identities of the scholar. Method: This exploratory qualitative study uses a reflexive dialogical single case study approach to understand how Katlego (a pseudonym), a cisgender heterosexual researcher, is affected by his interest in LGBT studies. Continuous supervision notes that enable thoughtful reflexive practice in qualitative research shaped the basis of this article. Results: This article shows how Katlego’s LGBT research interest resulted in him being policed, his professional intentions questioned, his bodily expression scrutinised and personal conflict being blamed on his allegedly ‘disgraceful’ research interest. Furthermore, it demonstrates how the conflation of Katlego’s interest in LGBT research with pervasive negative assumptions of non-heteronormative sexual orientations, gender identities and expressions has resulted in a shift in his professional and personal identities. Conclusion: This article calls for awareness of the issues faced by all researchers interested in LGBT research and support strategies for navigating the professional identity, workplace environment and social ecologies within a frowned-upon research field. Failure to do so could compromise their career trajectory, well-being and safety in compulsory heterosexual environments. Contribution: This article illustrated how gender regimes position the researcher as an active creator of knowledge; therefore, the research process experiences can neither be made invisible nor neutralised. Researchers must overtly consider and prepare for situational and unanticipated ethical issues.
Social identities within post-apartheid South Africa remain highly contested with issues of race and racism often dominating the national discourse. In order to find their place within the national narrative, white South Africans need to re-think their stories, re-define their positions in society and re-imagine their own narratives of identity and belonging.
By exploring whiteness and white identity through the lens of literary journalism, this book reflects on ways in which writers use the uncertainties and contradictions inherent in this genre to reveal the complexities of white identity formation and negotiation within contemporary society. Authors such as Rian Malan (My Traitor’s Heart), Antjie Krog (Country of My Skull and Begging to Be Black), Jonny Steinberg (Midlands) and Kevin Bloom (Ways of Staying) are writing at times of political and social flux. By working at the fault line of literature and journalism, these literary journalists not only mirror the volatility of their social setting but also endeavour to find new narrative forms, revealing the inherent anxiety and possibility of whiteness in contemporary South Africa.
Masculinities, militarisation and the End Conscription Campaign explores the gendered dynamics of apartheid-era South Africa's militarisation and analyses the defiance of compulsory military service by individual white men, and the anti-apartheid activism of the white men and women in the End Conscription Campaign (ECC), the most significant white anti-apartheid movement to happen in South Africa. Military conscription and objection to it are conceptualised as gendered acts of citizenship and premised on and constitutive of masculinities.
Conway draws upon a range of materials and disciplines to produce this socio-political study. Sources include interviews with white men who objected to military service in the South African Defence Force (SADF); archival material, including military intelligence surveillance of the ECC; ECC campaigning material, press reports and other pro-state propaganda. The analysis is informed by perspectives in sociology, international relations, history and from work on contemporary militarised societies such as those in Israel and Turkey. This book also explores the interconnections between militarisation, sexuality, race, homophobia and political authoritarianism
The end of apartheid predictably caused something of an identity crisis for white South Africans. The sense of uncertainty about what it means to be white has led to much public debate about whiteness in South Africa, as well as a growing body of literature on whites in post-apartheid South Africa. One of the many responses to this need to rethink white identity has been the claim by some that white South Africans can be considered to be African or ought to begin to think of themselves as being African. This paper argues that whites' assertion of an African identity does not necessarily assist in the achievement of racial justice, but that some kind of shift in white identity is required in order for whites to be able to contribute to the achievement of a racially just South Africa. In making this argument, the paper brings contemporary discussions on race and whiteness, and in particular discussions about racial eliminativism, to bear on the question of whether or not white South Africans may rightly claim an African identity.
This article traces both the centrality and fragility of the figure of the heterosexual white male to the moral and ideological core of the apartheid regime. Through a comparative reading of Zakes Mda's The Madonna of Excelsior (2002) and Gerald Kraak's Ice in the Lungs (2006), the article examines how apartheid's Immorality Act functioned as the legislative mechanism to produce and police heteronormative whiteness. The randomness and unpredictability of sexual desire in both historical novels expose the tenuousness of this idealised heteronormative whiteness that lay at the centre of the apartheid project. Situated within the moral panic and political turmoil of the 1970s, the novels identify sex as a powerful lens through which to read the history of apartheid. While Mda's satirical novel focuses on transgressive interracial sexual desire, Kraak's realist text explores same-sex desire and intimacy. My reading of the two novels engages with the political history of apartheid's sexual policing and insists on the inextricable entanglement of its heteronormative and racial supremacist provisions. The traditional ideological centrality of the vulnerable white woman is displaced in the novels by white men whose transgressive sexual desires for black women (in Mda's novel) and other white men (in Kraak's) refuse the certainty and naturalness of heteronormative whiteness.
Through an examination of Daphne Rooke's ‘coloured’ narrator Selina in Mittee (195127.
Rooke, Daphne. 1991 [1951]. Mittee. London: Penguin.View all references), this article explores, on the one hand, the extent to which the narrator's critical perspective on whiteness and racial essentialism could be achieved in the novel and, on the other, how adequately a white apartheid-era author could depict a black narrator. Exploring Mittee’s ambivalence in relation to the topic of race via a discussion of the novel's depictions of the performativity of whiteness, racial mimicry, sexual relations and embodiment, the article argues that the novel is most politically potent in its critique of white society, but also incapable of transcending the bounds of whiteness to represent Selina in any way other than in relation to it. While whiteness is made subversively visible in the novel, counter to its invisible normalisation in racially unequal societies like the novel's South African setting and South Africa in the 1950s when Rooke published Mittee, it is, within a current reading, ultimately too visible and is presented at the expense of the narrator's specificity.
This article explores the production of post-apartheid Afrikaner identity in South Africa. Centred around the private sphere
of the braai, the article draws on discursive psychology to investigate the participants' dilemmas and struggles over their identity as
Afrikaners, South Africans, and Africans, and the ways in which these identities are being redefined. The ‘backstage’ talk
that is usually reserved for fellow whites or Afrikaners illustrates a clear difference between public and private constructions
of Afrikaner identity. While the participants rejected many stereotypes of Afrikaner identity, they simultaneously recycled
key discourses underlying apartheid ideology, particularly discourses of black incompetence and whites under threat. Participants
generally claimed status as ‘Africans’ but strongly resisted assimilation with ‘Africa’ or a broader African identity. The
article concludes that the construction of the Afrikaner community as embattled and systematically oppressed might provide
powerful support for extremism.
As old identity verities are dislodged, post-apartheid South Africa is witness to dramatic identitary flux. This study examines Afrikaner identity and particularly that of the generational cohort who witnessed the end of apartheid as young adults. Employing a hermeneutic semiology, the study provides a reading of Johannes Kerkorrel's music, arguing that, as cultural text, it enacts identitary discourse and tension. As such, several identitary moments and motifs are noted across a period of roughly 20 years, including that of identity as rebellion, location and individualising interiority. Finally, it is suggested that the law-of-the-father, as apartheid bequest, organises and animates identity struggles for this generation.
Throughout the history of South Africa, but especially since the end of apartheid, white South Africans have left, and returned to, the country in significant numbers. Because of political arrangements, ancestral privileges and perceived cultural affinities, the plurality migrate to the UK. Drawing on new materialist approaches to race, in this article I emphasize the links between past and present histories of migration between the UK and South Africa in order to explore the construction of an embodied transnational whiteness. Because they have recent ancestors who emigrated from Britain, or other countries now in the EU, during the colonial, segregationist and apartheid periods, many white South Africans have the automatic right to visas to live and work in the UK, and hundreds of thousands have left — and returned — since 1994. Drawing on a series of in-depth interviews with white South African return migrants in Durban, largest city in the province formerly known as Natal — commonly called the ‘last outpost of the British Empire’ — I argue that, through what I call the ‘visa whiteness machine’, whiteness as a racial formation — neither a natural fact nor simply a discourse — emerges not discursively but materially as certain bodies with European ancestry and phenotype come to stick together through their motility — their immanent ability to move in particular circuits through transnational space. In the uneasily globalizing post-apartheid moment, pre-histories of colonial movement thus hang spectrally — and materially — over the present, as spatialized/racialized identities are contested, reconstructed and reinscribed through emigration and return.
The central question for whiteness in post-apartheid South Africa can be put simply: how to maintain privilege in a situation in which black people have achieved political power. Many stances to the new dispensation are available to white South Africans, but this article concerns only resistant white discourses, referred to as White Talk. Two weekly columns published through 2000 in the most widely read Sunday newspaper in the country were downloaded and analysed. The article demonstrates how two discursive repertoires, New South Africa Speak and White Ululation are played off against each other to enable positive self-presentation while resisting transformation. In some ways South African White Talk has come to resemble the more 'respectable' international whitenesses, but the postcolonial, post-apartheid context gives it a different edge, particularly in relation to constructions of Africa.
Arguing that the complex dynamic inherent in institutionalized domestic work during apartheid and its impact on social and institutional relationships is still salient in contemporary South Africa, I unpack the way in which White narrators construct their relationship with Black domestic workers in their memories of apartheid. Drawing on the nearly 200 narratives that have been submitted to the Apartheid Archive Project (www.apartheidarchive.org.za), I examine stories that reflect the foundational nature of the institution of domestic work for the reproduction of White and middle-class privilege and power. I focus on the way in which relations of power are articulated through domestic practices narrated in the stories collected, and the construction of normative White privilege and authority through the power and control the White child is granted in relation to Black adults. The article also highlights the enmeshment of care/intimacy and humiliation/denigration in this institution which may persist in contemporary South Africa and be implicated in violence and abuse of Black women in particular. It further explores how White narrators' stories are imbued with emotion and nostalgia, articulating notions of love, family, nurturance, and comfort in their stories of their “nannies,” while at the same time, it is argued, fraught with guilt and discomfort at the recognition of their part in oppression.
This paper argues that post-apartheid South Africa destabilised what it means to be white and Afrikaans in South Africa. In particular, it explores the emergence into visibility of so-called ‘zef’-culture as mediated through musical acts like Die Antwoord and Jack Parow and to a lesser extent websites such as Watkykjy. The authors argue that the reconfiguration of white Afrikaans identities as mediated through ‘zef’-cultural artefacts is deliberate in that it speaks to the perceived sense of marginal and liminal experience of white Afrikaans youth in post-apartheid South Africa.
This article surveys the interdisciplinary field of whiteness studies and outlines an emerging 'third wave' of research in this international and interdisciplinary field. This article begins by locating the origins of whiteness studies in the work of W.E.B. DuBois, who provided the intellectual foundations for this body of scholarship. We then identify three characteristics that distinguish this 'third wave' of research from earlier studies. This new wave of research utilizes: 1) innovative research methodologies including analyses of 'racial consciousness biographies', music and visual media; 2) an analysis of the recuperation of white innocence and reconstitution of white supremacy in neo-apartheid, post-imperial and post-Civil Rights contexts; and 3) analyses of white identity formation among members of racial and ethnic minorities.
Over the course of the life of the policy of apartheid, the South African State undertook an exercise of classifying the population into different racial categories. These racial classifications were accepted by most but also disputed by many individuals who appealed to be reclassified into other categories or were forcefully reclassified. Interwoven with the processes of racial classification and objections against classification were the laws against inter-racial coupling. The police arrested and the courts prosecuted thousands of individuals for unlawful sex with persons regarded as of other races. This article employs four illustrative cases to show how a certain idea of whiteness was constituted, elaborated, and rooted. The analysis undertaken in this article is grounded on the reports carried in the annual Survey of Race Relations in South Africa about the population of South Africa in the 1960s, a period that has been referred to as the hey-day of apartheid. The article underlines the role of sexuality in the making of whiteness, linking the intention of the immorality laws with the creation of whiteness generally and dominant white masculinity specifically. The State is shown to have been a principal actor in the rendition of sexuality as constitutive of whiteness. The article concludes that over the years the idea of sexuality and sexual immorality as conveyed by the apartheid legal Acts ended up distending the conception of being white, reshaping the development of personal and social relations of whites to each other and to members of groupings.
The end of apartheid has brought a resurgence of research into racial identities, attitudes and behaviour in South Africa. The legacy of systematic racial ordering and discrimination under apartheid is that South Africa remains deeply racialised, in cultural and social terms, as well as deeply unequal, in terms of the distribution of income and opportunities. South Africans continue to see themselves in the racial categories of the apartheid era, in part because these categories have become the basis for post-apartheid ‘redress’, in part because they retain cultural meaning in everyday life. South Africans continue to inhabit social worlds that are largely defined by race, and many express negative views of other racial groups. There has been little racial integration in residential areas, although schools provide an important opportunity for inter-racial interaction for middle-class children. Experimental and survey research provide little evidence of racism, however. Few people complain about racial discrimination, although many report everyday experiences that might be understood as discriminatory. Racial discrimination per se seems to be of minor importance in shaping opportunities in post-apartheid South Africa. Far more important are the disadvantages of class, exacerbated by neighbourhood effects: poor schooling, a lack of footholds in the labour market, a lack of financial capital. The relationship between race and class is now very much weaker than in the past. Overall, race remains very important in cultural and social terms, but no longer structures economic advantage and disadvantage.
Proposing a version of whiteness studies for South Africa, this article lays some of the groundwork for a research project that is yet to be comprehensively tackled. Over the past 30 or so years in progressive scholarship in and about South Africa, whiteness has become so deligitimised by virtue of its complicity with apartheid that it has often been rendered “blank”, a taken‐for‐granted negative essence, a place less looked‐into and a site of assumed uniformity. The essay suggests that if one were to reopen the category of South African whiteness and begin to de‐essentialise it, in all likelihood what one might call the “difference within” would both contradict assumptions of uniformity and prove interesting. The article summarises and analyses trends in whiteness studies in the US and suggests ways in which such a project might be differently tackled for South African purposes.
This is an intellectual, political, and institutional history of scientific racist thought focused on the Carnegie Corporation’s antipoverty philanthropy with “poor whites” in South Africa (1927–1932). I trace the origins, analysis, and outcomes of the Carnegie Commission in apartheid law and in cultural and social organizations that synchronized Afrikaner Nationalism. I study the conditions that shaped the study and of how the study was used in building South African social science about race and poverty. This case study analyzes how a global racial order—“global whiteness”—working with the racial logic of white vulnerability, provided the conditions for the Carnegie Poor White Study. In discussing the theory of global whiteness, I demonstrate that white supremacy has been essential for constituting both epistemic knowledge in academic disciplines and for constituting nation-states. The influence of international philanthropy on the creation of a distinctly racial conception of citizenship and democracy in South Africa during the consolidation of grand apartheid and Afrikaner Nationalism indicates a need for research on racial polities that foregrounds race in the making of international affairs. Waste of a White Skin addresses how non–South African philanthropic institutions were invested in making white identity and entrenching racialized citizenship and democracy. The Carnegie Corporation’s focus on “poor whites” expanded the politics of scientific racism and the idea of a civilizing mission that had South African society and social science as its beneficiaries. I extend our understanding of the history of apartheid to include pre-World War II U.S.-based racial philosophies and policies; I reveal how the racialization of poor whites functioned with other processes to establish “grand apartheid” in 1948; and I articulate a theory of global whiteness that emerges from the literatures on race in international relations and racial blackness and empire. Through this, I raise questions about how international debates on race affect domestic racial citizenship. I point to how a global racial regime—global whiteness—constitutes domestic racial policies and, in some ways, animates black consciousness. I also indicate that the supposed discontinuity of racial geography is, in fact, porous and nearly always permeable.
In this article, I use Gay Pages as a local archive of cultural meaning to think about the relationship between race, sexuality, and identity in a post-apartheid context. Through an analysis of the quarterly magazine series, I focus on how an invisible and unacknowledged whiteness marks privileged ways of both speaking and being heard. I argue that whiteness continues to function as the custodian of the normative in much of South Africa’s public discourse – a post-apartheid racial politics with implications that exceed this particular cultural text. I focus on editions of the magazine published between 2012 and 2016 in order to identify the continuities in normative racial and gendered power. The analysis extends beyond a consideration of the magazine’s erasure of non-white bodies and takes the form of a close reading of the assumptions and racial histories that underpin a number of articles and editorials. My analysis of the magazine centres on several key themes including the interplay between local ideas and transnational cultural flows; the production and circulation of an assimilationist aesthetic; revisionist histories of the past; and representations of pride marches.
This paper enters the dialogue on representations of white South Africa in the contemporary historical moment. It asks whether the configuration of white autobiography has shifted and altered over time, and whether certain modes of representation continue to hold a significant place in the South African culture of letters. Clearly, autobiography still occupies a prominent position in this culture : the genre is hailed as having resuscitated local narratives by narrowing the gulf between the academic study of literature and the reading habits of the 'ordinary' South African. A cursory glance at the shelves of mainstream literary outlets, such as Exclusive Books and the CNA, demonstrates the popularity of this genre - in its various forms, including those that blend fiction and life-writing, it populates the South African literature sections of these institutions. Leading this trend are novels like John Van de Ruit's Spud series, a trilogy championed in media reviews for "its popularity with both highbrow and lowbrow audiences" ("100 Young South Africans" 1).
A pathbreaking history of the development of scientific racism, white nationalism, and segregationist philanthropy in the U.S. and South Africa in the early twentieth century, Waste of a White Skin focuses on the American Carnegie Corporation's study of race in South Africa, the Poor White Study, and its influence on the creation of apartheid.This book demonstrates the ways in which U.S. elites supported apartheid and Afrikaner Nationalism in the critical period prior to 1948 through philanthropic interventions and shaping scholarly knowledge production. Rather than comparing racial democracies and their engagement with scientific racism, Willoughby-Herard outlines the ways in which a racial regime of global whiteness constitutes domestic racial policies and in part animates black consciousness in seemingly disparate and discontinuous racial democracies. This book uses key paradigms in black political thought-black feminism, black internationalism, and the black radical tradition-to provide a rich account of poverty and work. Much of the scholarship on whiteness in South Africa overlooks the complex politics of white poverty and what they mean for the making of black political action and black people's presence in the economic system.Ideal for students, scholars, and interested readers in areas related to U.S. History, African History, World History, Diaspora Studies, Race and Ethnicity, Sociology, Anthropology, and Political Science.
In the last years of apartheid, white South African society found itself in the grip of previously unimaginable social and political change, which sometimes manifested in morbid cultural symptoms. This book considers two of those symptoms, a pair of matched moral panics that appeared in the contemporary media and in popular literature. It argues that excessive reactions to the apparent threat posed by a cult of white Satanists, never proven to exist, and to a so-called epidemic of white family murder reveal important truths about fear, violence and resistance, as well as fragmentations within the poles of white South African identity: nationalism, gender, history, the family, even whiteness itself. Together, the Satanism scare and the family murder ‘epidemic’ draw a compelling picture of the psychic landscape of white culture at the end of apartheid, revealing both pathological responses to social change and the brutalising effects that apartheid had on those who benefited from it most.
In addition to introducing this seminar of five contributions concerning South African apocalyptic and dystopian fiction, this article contextualizes and surveys the history of our literature of pessimistic prediction. It characterizes the representation of dark horizons as predominantly the expression of white political, cultural and existential anxieties. Given this understanding, the argument considers the ideological valence and import of this literature. In particular, it explores relations between political history and affect, suggesting that apocalyptic prediction depends on a teleology that inhibits an ethical understanding of the complexities of South African political history. The article goes on to consider the creative and critical dangers of circumscribing the apocalyptic imagination and concludes with a defence of public pessimism.
This paper compares the working lives of different generations of British expatriate women living in Johannesburg, South Africa. The city has strong and established transnational connections with Europe and consequently has a substantial population of white, highly skilled professionals who have come to take advantage of the benefits that South Africa has consistently delivered to whiteness. However, now nearly twenty years since the post-apartheid Government came into office, an important question to ask is how aims for racial equality are playing out in everyday life. This paper explores this question by drawing on new research evidence which looks at the changing labour market fortunes of British women migrants in South Africa. I argue that whilst the resources of whiteness/Britishness are becoming increasingly less certain, contemporary migrants may still draw upon their transnational advantages to maintain their expectations of cultural and economic privilege.
In this paper, I argue that Samantha Vice is correct to claim that whites should feel shame and regret, though perhaps not guilt, at their whiteness. She is wrong, however, to suggest that there is a sense in which whites should live in silence and humility, and withdraw from public political space. In particular, I argue that this latter claim has absurd consequences, since it implies a withdrawal from non-public and non-political spaces also. Besides, whites, as complex selves, face conflicting reasons for action which Vice insufficiently grapples with. I conclude, however, that Vice is best interpreted as rightly suggesting that whites should live in careful reflective self-awareness of how their whiteness, and whiteliness, unfairly privileges them, still. This is preferable advice to Vice’s notions of silence and humility which are rightly but unnecessarily susceptible to confusion and compelling counterargument. Or so I argue.
This article focuses on constructions of whiteness in South African autobiographies and other narratives of the self. It attempts to understand how the category of whiteness—racial, social, political, and economic—is given meaning in this context. The essay departs from US- and British-based studies of whiteness, as well as from African studies of “settlers.” It aims to draw out the particularities of the South African context and the ways in which whiteness emerges within the tropes of looking, watching, masking, concealment, transfiguration, and secrecy in these texts. It shows that the play between visibility and invisibility emerges as a central paradox in this body of writing. Thus it attempts to shift contemporary South African discussions away from racism per se toward a discussion of how race works in psychical, symbolic, and political terms. It considers amplifications of whitenesses which may have been at odds with official and critical orthodoxies in order to approach registers out of which whiteness may come to be situated differently in this context.
Afrikaner nationalism achieved notoriety for its power and dominance of the political life of the South African state for much of the latter half of the 20th century. Nearly two decades on from the first democratic elections, in South Africa in 1994, Afrikaner nationalism is a spent force and the question is how to explain its decline. In this article it is argued that one has to look beyond historical and political accounts that focus on the structural factors that enable nationalism and ethnicity. In narratives of the self, young Afrikaners give insights into the formation of identities and modes of existence and lifestyles, or processes of subjectivisation, that indicate the cultural reasons for political actions. Increasing wealth in a growing consumer society has led to the formation of individual identities no longer contained with an ethno-nationalist framework. With the legacy of having contributed to, and benefited from apartheid, young Afrikaners are seeing the possibilities that come with a new, emerging South African nation but also face the challenge of coming to terms with feelings of loss and exclusion. While the cracks of a racist enclosure are widening, the opening of the apartheid mind is still a work in progress.
This paper poses the question of why South African whites eventually acquiesced in the democratic transition of the 1990s. Whilst domestic and international political pressure was clearly the crucial factor in bringing about change, the question of why whites did not go along with right wing advocacy of continued defence of the status quo remains. The argument of the paper is that the subjectivities of whites changed between the 1970s and the 1990s in a way which made them much less available for mobilization in defence of apartheid. They moved from strong identification with the modernist, statist project of apartheid, to far more individualized and consumerist self-identities. This was the outcome of an interaction between the changing internal class structure and the global socio-cultural changes associated with late modernity.
This paper addresses the politics of color-blindness in comparative perspective as its meaning has changed over the past half-century. Drawing on the cases of South Africa and the United States, I focus in particular on the socio-political and psychological functions that color-blind ideology performs for whites in defending white advantage in the present context. Although in the past color-blindness served as an effective rallying cry for the abolition of Jim Crow and the demise of apartheid, the very same principle serves in the post-segregation context to stall transformation of the racial order in the direction of greater equality. It is an irony that the principle of color-blindness that so effectively mobilized opposition to the institutionally racist order in both national contexts mutates at the very moment of apparent victory into one that radically limits the anti-racist imagination.
‘Hybrid’ identity has been posited as a desirable ideal in post‐apartheid South Africa. For white writers, this is as yet unrealised: white writing is still white writing. Indeed, contemporary writing in or of the New South Africa both conceals and displays a crisis in identity and subjectivity for whites – and in particular for white women. Gillian Slovo describes the necessity for role play, for a masquerade of normative feminine whiteness, during the years of apartheid and political detentions. However, the writing of her autobiography, which in many ways is not so much Gillian's life story as that of her parents, enacts a further, more complex masquerade. This article seeks to unmask hidden dilemmas of femininity, gesturing towards the troubled negotiations of a number of white women writers. The notion of femininity as masquerade is explicated in Joan Riviere's now well‐known psychoanalytic essay, ‘Womanliness as a Masquerade’ (1929). Reference to Riviere's essay is not to excavate (colonial) psychoanalytic discourse unquestioningly as an apt tool for reading postcolonial texts, but rather to read this somewhat against the grain, so as to enable a reading of contemporary South African women's narratives which reveals traces of white femininity's dilemmas. The representations of white women in the texts of Gillian Slovo, Elleke Boehmer and Sarah Penny mark discursive paths – inscriptions of whiteness, guilt and culpability. In a part of the world being ‘painted over again’, some white women writers must, it would seem, seek a whiter shade of pale.
This essay argues that Damon Galgut’s The Good Doctor (200316.
Galgut , D. 2003 . The good doctor , London : Penguin . View all references) contests the version of national allegory on which its interpreters have relied. It suggests that, in juxtaposing Frank Eloff’s pragmatism and Laurence Waters’ idealism, the novel opposes two ways of making meaning: the one a complex, polysemic mediation of the private and the public, and the other an idealistic version of history that identifies watersheds it subsequently takes to be constitutive of individuals’ consciousness. Following a brief description of allegory in post‐colonial critique, the article proposes that, if the novel is allegorical, it is so in a far more complex sense than schematic impositions of South African history allow. Rather, the novel engages allegory, as a practice of meaning, by foregrounding the process of identification in which individuals encounter, traverse and rework the history of their context.
Recent scholarship on race in South Africa reveals that post‐1994 performances of whiteness are plagued by considerable anxiety. Shifts in identification that have been taking place under the sign of whiteness since the end of minority rule can be ascribed, in part, to the fact that previously sanctioned stagings of whiteness are increasingly registered as untenable in the everyday post‐apartheid inter‐racial encounter. In the shadow of these changing pressures, white South African cultural workers have been working hard to revise available categories of identification and to offer new vocabularies for thinking through inter‐subjective relations and racial embodiment in a democratic South Africa. This paper reads one of the cultural texts engaged in this project, namely Antjie Krog's A Change of Tongue, in an effort to consider some of the terms that are emerging to make the white South African body compatible with the ideological projects of the post‐apartheid order. Krog uses translation – as a trope and as a practice of inter‐lingual, subjective and somatic transfer and transformation – to mediate some of the ideological challenges faced by the post‐apartheid white Afrikaner. I argue that what Krog's theorisation of translation attempts to offer the white Afrikaans subject is premised on an ultimately idealistic and individualistic conception of personal fulfilment through the fraught process of ‘Africanisation‚.
Twelve years after the transition from apartheid to democracy. South Africa remains a severely unequal society. On the one side of the divide are relatively prosperous white South Africans and an increasing black middle and upper class; and on the other side are harshly poor black South Africans. Despite decreasing interracial inequality, many white South Africans remain in a highly privileged position at the intersection of continued race and class systems of privilege. Research on whiteness in South Africa indicates that inequality is actively maintained by the discourses mobilised by white South Africans. This study was interested in furthering such research. A discourse analysis was applied to ten in-depth, semi-structured interviews with white, wealthy South Africans, to identify the ways in which meaning was being constructed around issues of poverty and development. J.B. Thompson's (1984) framework was applied to these discourses, to identify whether they were operating ideologically (to maintain unequal relations of race and class domination). Findings indicate that participants were mobilising discourses that function to maintain a system of race and class privilege. These findings have implications for the future focus of development strategy in South Africa.
Summary in English. Word processed copy. Thesis (M.A. (Research Psychology))--University of Cape Town, 2003. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 126-139).
- Carolin See
See, for example, Carolin (2017), Conway (2017), Falkof (2015), Hyslop
(2000), Ratele (2009), Rauwerda (2007), and Shefer (2012).
- See
- Grogan
See, for example, Grogan (2015), Mbao (2010), Nuttall (2001), Scott (2018),
Steyn and Foster (2008), and Titlestad (2009, 2015).
The Visa Whiteness Machine
- References Andrucki
References
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2010
The Visa Whiteness Machine: Transnational Motility in Post-Apartheid South Africa. Ethnicities 10(3): 358-370.
Militarisation and the End Conscription Campaign: War Resistance in Apartheid South Africa
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Masculinities, Militarisation and the End Conscription Campaign:
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Sitting Pretty: White Afrikaans Women in Postapartheid South Africa
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Van der Westhuizen, Christi
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Sitting Pretty: White Afrikaans Women in Postapartheid South Africa.
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Van Heerden, Esther
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Transformation and Communitas: Afrikaans Identities as Viewed Through the Lens of South African Arts Festivals: 1995-2006. Unpublished doctoral dissertation
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- Conway Daniel
Why Did Apartheid's Supporters Capitulate? "Whiteness
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Hyslop, Jonathan
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Why Did Apartheid's Supporters Capitulate? "Whiteness", Class and
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