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Antjie Krog's autobiographical novel A change of tongue presents a diversified conglomerate of different genres and parts. One of the major thematic focal points is the evident aim of the I-narrator/protagonist to reconstitute her identity as a white Afrikaans woman so as to establish her claim to belong, as a 'post-white' African, to the land and its aboriginal people. This paper investigates this intent through an analysis of the depiction of the physicality of the novel's main figures, and especially that of the I-narrator. This analysis, in turn, reveals a significant tendency towards mythicising, which highlights some of the problematic of the text, along with the inner contradictions inherent in the I-narrator's desire to be assimilated unquestionably and legitimately into the new socio-political context of her country. It will be shown that her attempt to re-write her personal white identity into a native African one leads to the individualistic and subjective misrepresentation of an established historical reality and context by mythicising it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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‚. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Africans have become firmly part of Australian society. They account for an increasing proportion of its total population. This article draws from empirical data generated via in-depth semi-structured interviews with 30 participants in South East Queensland. The findings suggest that the discursive constructions of Africans in everyday language and social relations in Australia work to construct their lived reality of being; becoming and being positioned as a racialized subject, leading to objectification, marginalization, exclusion and disadvantage. The article advocates for systemic changes that will end the problems of everyday racism at both state and national levels, and for the introduction of programs that will encourage the inclusion, belonging and full participation of visible and ethnically marked immigrants to Australia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article looks at inscriptions of whiteness in selected white Zimbabwean narratives. Through a reading of Andrea Eames'The Cry of the Go-Away Bird(2011), Alexandra Fuller'sDon't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight(2003) and John Eppel'sAbsent: the English Teacher(2009), the argument proposes that white Zimbabwean narratives situate whiteness within the context of change and marginality in Zimbabwe. The narratives deal with experiences of change and apprehensions of lived reality marked by the transfer of power from white minority to black majority rule. Our reading ofThe Cry of the Go-Away Birdexamines how whiteness in the postcolonial Zimbabwean state is perceived through an outsider's gaze, resulting in a kind of double consciousness within the (racialized, white) subject of the gaze. It is argued that the text depicts whites as torn between two unreconciled streams of possibility, reinforcing their sense of alienation. Fuller'sDon't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonightrepresents whiteness as a thoroughly ephemeral experience. The meaning of whiteness is mediated through perpetual physical movement as whites travel from one point to another. Eppel'sAbsent: the English Teacheraffords a rethinking of whiteness as an unstable form of identity contingent on historical and political factors. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

There is an important history often neglected by genealogies of 'critical whiteness studies': Steve Biko's Black Consciousness critique of white liberalism. What would it mean to retrieve this criticism in the context of white anti-racism in the post-apartheid era? Said's (2003) contrapuntal method proves useful here as a juxtaposing device whereby the writings of a past figure can be critically harnessed, travelling across temporal and ideological boundaries to interrogate the present. Four interlinked modes of disingenuous white anti-racism can thus be identified: (1) a fetishistic preoccupation with disproving one's racism; (2) ostentatious forms of anti-racism that function as means of self-promotion, as paradoxical means of white self-love; (3) the consolidation and extension of agency through redemptive gestures of 'heroic white anti-racism'; (4) 'charitable anti-racism' which fixes tolerance within a model of charity, as an act of generosity and that reiterates the status and role of an anti-racist benefactor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The post-apartheid era necessitates the rethinking of white identities in South Africa. One way in which some white South Africans are seeking to redefine themselves is through describing themselves as African. However, claims by white South Africans that they too are Africans have been met with mixed responses from black South Africans. In this article I use contributions to an online university students' forum to explore ways in which some white South Africans are embracing an African identity and to consider ways in which some black South Africans are responding to white South Africans' shifting identities. I use contributions to this forum as a starting point to think about the possibilities and limitations that the embracing of an African identity has for the development of what Frankenberg calls 'anti-racist forms of whiteness' among white South Africans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This review essay critiques Johann van Rooyen's The new great trek: the story of South Africa's white exodus. It asserts that there are problems with the book's title, structure, and theoretical foundation. This essay contends that there is a problematic reiteration of the rhetoric of crime grounded in a racial dichotomy. It discusses the rhetorics that link whiteness with normalcy and South Africanness, as well as van Rooyen's inappropriate use of terms such as 'exiles', 'victims', and 'diaspora' for these white emigrants. It offers a further analysis of van Rooyen's extended discussion of crime in one section of the book. The essay concludes by offering brief comment on other weaknesses and strengths of the book. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this essay I explore issues of ‘white’ subjectivity in post‐apartheid South Africa. I identify and focus on two types of ‘pride’ expressed and articulated by many white South Africans today. The first type of ‘pride’ is a validated pride (validated by the people who express it): for example, many white South Africans are ‘proud’ to be a part of ‘post‐reconciliation’, democratic South Africa. Moreover, many white South Africans feel proud that they lived through (and in some cases facilitated) the transition in 1994. The second type of pride that I identify is different to, or even contradicts, the first type. This second type of pride is encapsulated in the phrase: ‘I am proud to be South African because I am South African’. This (latter) pride is not ‘validated’ – it is a tautological, or ‘prideless’ pride, that is not contingent on specific characteristics of South Africa. The second type of pride is pride in being who you are (no matter who you are). In this essay, I explore these two ‘types’ of prides and investigate how they intersect, contradict, or support each other in the lives of contemporary white South Africans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]