Search

In this article, I consider a selection of photographs of a man of color from a luxury book of male nudes, Images (1982), aimed at white gay men and published in South Africa by Alternative Books (AB) in the late apartheid period. Given the exclusive association of assimilable homosexuality with whiteness in the national gay press and other homoerotic commodities available in South Africa at the same historical juncture, I propose that these photographs, which interrupted longstanding, racist homoerotic iconographies, elicited experiences of ambivalence (and thus critical reflection) amongst their historical audiences. To this end, I analyze the editorial and commercial content of the newspapers Link/Skakel and Exit for the period that AB was active (1981–1991), anticipating an overlap of readership between these papers and the publisher's titles. More precisely, I discuss the prevalence of the figure of the "good homosexual" and representations of classical (that is, white) male beauty in these papers to plot how apartheid logic was broadly reproduced (and same-sex desire disciplined according to such dictates) in mainstream South African gay movements, institutions, and print cultures during this time, but, notably, not in Images. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

South African white supremacy has been shaped by over 400 years of settler colonialism and white minority apartheid rule to craft a pervasive and entrenched legacy of privilege and oppression in the post-apartheid context. This paper explores the constructions of white supremacy, specifically its role in shaping the perceptions of first-generation mixed-race identity in South Africa, through semi-structured, in-depth interviews. Through a critical race theory and an intersectional lens, this paper unpacks the personal, political, and social impact of white supremacist structures on the identity construction of first-generation mixed-race people in post-apartheid South Africa; specifically, societal- and self-perceptions of their identity within power structures with which they interact. Moreover, this paper aims to understand how first-generation mixed-race people understand their connections to white privilege. Ultimately this paper argues that although first-generation mixed-race people experience relative privilege, their access to white privilege and acceptance within structures of whiteness is always conditional. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Food and identity have much to do with each other. In the African context, however, food is studied through developmentalist lenses far more than through cultural ones. Therefore, we know little about the ways in which food and contemporary, particularly urban, African identities shape each other. I explore this relationship through an analysis of personal food narratives gathered as part of a four-year research project exploring food memories, values and practices in three South African cities. Meat appears frequently in these narratives, and this paper focuses on this powerful food, sandwiching data analysis between short biographical reflections that personalize the paper's intellectual arguments. Using the metaphor of "spillage" as a tool, I show how personal narratives about meat raise questions about identity formation, sometimes surprisingly. These stories about how meat matters, help to deepen understanding of how racial identities take shape in this context. While this is important in itself, these narratives point to the entanglements between race and larger questions: about planetary health, inter-species relationships, morality and humanitude. The contribution of this paper to Food Studies is the demonstration that broader ethical questions about food, specifically meat, cannot be separated from (carefully contextualized) imaginaries and materialities of cultural identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the politics of emotion in white students' experiential narratives about institutional attempts to transform racial demographics and relationships within residences at a historically white South African university. Three distinct narrative forms are presented each with a unique emotional politics constructed around the tropes of "culture" and "tradition". The "white victim" and "white saviour" narratives demonstrate an emotional investment in maintaining a sense of invulnerability combined with a politics of denial of continued racial injustice. In contrast, a third narrative form "out of my comfort zone" demonstrates an opening through which some white students are coming to challenge the comfortable norms of whiteness both internally as well as externally. The paper argues that through coming to embody the emotional position of vulnerability these students have developed a transformative capacity for "critical cultural openness" which represents a different emotional politics to the white victim and white saviour narratives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores strategies deployed by a sample of white, British-born South Africans to account for their positions during apartheid and post-apartheid. Whereas literature on white racism identifies denial as a key strategy towards racial discrimination and the maintenance of privilege, the historical and political 10 context of South Africa makes this tactic implausible. The paper contributes to understandings of pluralism within white identifications through investigation of diverse discursive strategies used to frame the overtly racist, apartheid regime and the present post-apartheid, supposedly, 'post-race' state. A range of positions attempting to minimise individual implication are identified. 15 A common feature however is to reimagine the structure of social relations in order to diminish responsibility for the sins of the past or the success of the future; suggesting profound difficulties in adjusting to the new social reality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Robin DiAngelo's influential concept of white fragility, while certainly suggestive and critically useful, does not go far enough in accounting for three central aspects of white anxiety as it occurs in the (post-)apartheid South African context. Utilizing Lacanian psychoanalytic theory to sketch a rudimentary paradigm of anxiety, and focusing on textual examples drawn from (post-)apartheid popular culture – including the work of Rian Malan and Neil Blomkamp's 2009 film District 9 – this paper opens up a series of distinct perspectives on (post-)apartheid whiteness. Departing from the construct of white fragility – which is less destabilizing, less dynamic, and less attentive to the dimension of fantasy than is the notion of white anxiety – it offers instead a Lacanian psychoanalytic conceptualization of white anxiety. One implication of such a reading is that, beneath the racist defensiveness of post-apartheid whiteness, an ambiguous mode of unconscious identification racial otherness might indeed be at play. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the work of nostalgia in Denis Hirson's I Remember King Kong (The Boxer), a poetic memoir of childhood that met with both critical acclaim and remarkable commercial success when it was published in South Africa in 2004. The book provides a telling case study of the multifaceted operation of nostalgia in literature and culture, which is explored in this paper as not only a concern within literature, but also an affect produced in the reading of literature, which may take on ethical, social or political significance as a personal or cultural narrative as well as value as a commodity. Accordingly, the discussion attends both to the literary features of King Kong and to its publication and reception in South Africa. It is argued that the text presents a reflective engagement with memory that foregrounds the fluid and often dissonant relationship between the past and present, individual memory and public history. Yet the reception of this book about white childhood in a predominantly white market, within a society in which white nostalgia is an especially vexed phenomenon, also foregrounds nostalgia's ambivalent potential for both critique and consolation in the post-apartheid literary and cultural field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The real and imagined racial differences and similarities between groups of students and staff have consequences in everyday experiences in South Africa. One aspect of engaging with the challenges facing higher education transformation post-Apartheid is through understanding how the racialized context interacts with the experience of teaching. This paper reports on what the narratives of four white academics reveal about their experience of teaching at the University of Cape Town (UCT). It analyses indicators of their identity as white academics and how they are both positioned and actively position themselves in relation to students and other academics at UCT. Their narratives reveal how academics simultaneously grapple with the privileges and limitations that accompany identifying as white. These tensions are explored through issues of black student development amid an alienating institutional culture and opposition to the behaviour of their white colleagues. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper is part of a longer work on whiteness in post-apartheid South Africa, which analyzes the discourses resistant to transformation in the country, labeled "white talk." Based on a discourse analysis of the 2001 letters to the editor of Rapport newspaper, a national Afrikaans Sunday newspaper, this paper focuses on aspects of "white talk" within Afrikaans speaking South Africa. Afrikaner whiteness has an affinity with subaltern whiteness, in that Afrikaners contended with the more powerful forces of the British Empire throughout their history. As a resistant whiteness, the whiteness of the Afrikaner has historically been rolled into ethnic/nationalistic discourse. The current moment in South African history presents a crisis to Afrikaner identity similar to the time of dislocation that saw the original discursive suturing of Afrikaner identity into nationalism. But now the worldview has imploded; Apartheid is the "other" of the New South Africa; Afrikaners are perceived to be in need of "rehabilitation." Certain ethnic anxieties are pervasive, and the paper explores four of these. White talk in this context attempts to do two things: (1) to reinscribe the Afrikaner mythology that secured a special place for the Afrikaner in the political, economic, and social life of the country, so that the ground gained through the apartheid era of systematic Afrikaner advancement is not lost in the new social order, while (2) presenting Afrikanerdom as compatible with the New South Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While whiteness studies often begin from the assumption that being ‘white’ means having access to an unspoken centre of power, the third wave of whiteness studies focuses on nuanced forms of whiteness. In the post-apartheid context, various discursive strategies are employed by South African whites to retain privilege. Yet whiteness is also constructed spatially. Through an autoethnographic methodology, the paper explores the ‘inauthentic whiteness’ of the author. Drawing from the case studies of football supporters’ clubs in Johannesburg, South Africa, the actions of the author travelling through different racialised spaces in Johannesburg football fandom destabilised the supporters’ understanding of whiteness and what it was to be white. This inauthenticity created new opportunities for the supporters’ clubs to engage with the other, which had previously not existed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Multiculturalism currently aims for the political accommodation of difference instead of the subversion of the resulting privileges of difference. In the South African context such a distinction is especially important since the economic and symbolic subjugation of the majority of Black South Africans continues despite political transformation, and is exacerbated by an unwillingness to reflect on privilege and inequality. Drawing on Biko and Soudien’s critique of multiculturalism and vision for anti-racist education, this paper describes a classroom activity set for 164 nationally and culturally diverse second year sociology students at a university in Cape Town, South Africa. The activity tasked students to reflect on texts by Peggy McIntosh and Khaya Dlanga (one canonical, the other contextual) and reports on these students’ nuanced understandings of personal biography, experiences of privilege and self-reflexivity that connects personal experience to social structure and historical contexts. It concludes by offering modest implications for moral education in a multicultural university classroom. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper draws on fieldwork done in Greystone School in South Africa, a single sex girls' school. I explore how the legacy of coloniser and colonised is reconfigured through the history of the school and the particular racialised politics of South Africa, where race and class have always been imbricated in differently nuanced ways before, during and after apartheid. The young women have, for the most part, been produced and produced themselves as white youngladies– with the politesse and habitus that this implies. Thus, despite the current intake of a significant number of black girls from further north in Africa, some local Indian (in South African terms) pupils and a very few local black (African) young women, the school continues to support the production of whiteness and (middle) class amongst their students. Throughout, I show how global colonial and postcolonial narratives of whiteness have (and have had) their own particular form and relationship to narratives of whiteness in the changing South African context. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

This paper argues that, while the demise of apartheid has led to many situations in which South Africans now come into closer contact with one another, this increased 'contact' does not amount to greater racial integration. Contact occurs within a context of unequal power relations in which 'whiteness' continues to be privileged over 'blackness'. The result is that white people tend to benefit more from contact with the racial 'other' than black people, who often experience this contact as reinforcing their expectations of continued white dominance and privilege. While contact may undermine blatantly racist practices and overt racial conflict, racialized patterns of reasoning continue to exist, often unnoticed and unchallenged. These include the assumption that race is an incontrovertible fact of experience, the privileging of whiteness, the assumption that there exist different (biological) races which evince different forms of social behaviour and that these are essential properties of people rather than being historically or socially contingent. [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]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]