Rejane Williams | University of the Witwatersrand (original) (raw)
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Papers by Rejane Williams
Ethnicities, 2016
The growth of the black1middle class in ‘post-apartheid’2South Africa has become the subject of s... more The growth of the black1middle class in ‘post-apartheid’2South Africa has become the subject of scholarly and public interest. Applying elements of discourse analysis to interview and group discussion based data, this article provides a qualitative thematic exploration of two pressures that confront a group of black middle-class professionals residing in Johannesburg, South Africa. The first pressure is the experience of being black under the hegemonic white gaze and the second is the experience of the marshalling black gaze. The complexities of occupying the positions of being black and middle class and of living with the scrutiny of two gazes concurrently, is explored. The findings suggest that the white gaze persists in seeking to negatively mark and destabilise black professionals and profiting off covert and paradoxical mobilisations of race discourses as a means of bolstering whiteness. On the other hand, the black gaze serves to police the boundaries of what acceptable blackn...
Ethnicities, 2016
The growth of the black1middle class in ‘post-apartheid’2South Africa has become the subject of s... more The growth of the black1middle class in ‘post-apartheid’2South Africa has become the subject of scholarly and public interest. Applying elements of discourse analysis to interview and group discussion based data, this article provides a qualitative thematic exploration of two pressures that confront a group of black middle-class professionals residing in Johannesburg, South Africa. The first pressure is the experience of being black under the hegemonic white gaze and the second is the experience of the marshalling black gaze. The complexities of occupying the positions of being black and middle class and of living with the scrutiny of two gazes concurrently, is explored. The findings suggest that the white gaze persists in seeking to negatively mark and destabilise black professionals and profiting off covert and paradoxical mobilisations of race discourses as a means of bolstering whiteness. On the other hand, the black gaze serves to police the boundaries of what acceptable blackn...