Chapter 1. Adamastor Unbound? Whiteness and Landscape in Post-1994 South Africa (original) (raw)
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Giving back the land: Whiteness and belonging in contemporary South Africa
Doctoral Thesis, 2018
While previous research has unpicked the forced coincidence of racial and spatial relations, including through critical examinations of the role of environmentalist discourse in the reproduction of racial hierarchies, a careful analysis of the current South African conjuncture, with its combination of persistent racial inequality and growing political momentum behind radical land redistribution, has yet to be conducted. This dissertation approaches this task as a question of deconstructing the hegemonic relations between whiteness as a power structure, and “the land” as a material and symbolic resource. Arguing for a broader discursive interpretation, or ‘thick’ sense, of what is meant by “the land”, hegemonic land relations are analysed through a framework built both upon the repairs to Western Marxism elaborated by poststructuralist critics of Althusser and Gramsci, and on the radical critiques of colonialism and whiteness found in the work of Frantz Fanon, Steve Biko, and Sara Ahmed. Analysis is presented of four sets of articulations: the radical Black critique of the white relationship with the land, the conservative defence of whiteness as under siege by vengeful ‘Blacks’, the ‘whitely’ campaign against rhino poaching, and group conversations between white environmentalists intent on halting natural gas extraction through hydraulic fracturing in the Karoo. All four discursive formations rely on a “common-sense” notion of the inevitability and inviolability of white property and power, and the continued relevance of liberal notions of efficient land use and property ownership in the Lockean tradition, which contribute to the perpetuation of racial division in South Africa. A “structural topology" (Marttila, 2016, p. 134) of the discourse reveals the relevance of affect, racial actor fictions and narratives, notions of fairness and responsibility, and how specific institutions and subject roles materialise the discourses that entrench hegemonic whiteness.
2015
Racism, by nature, is intricately bonded with migration; the first takes its evolution from the other, after a locus is established for the construction of the „self‟ and „other‟ binary. The South African experience, in its uniqueness, is best illustrative of other melting cultures globally. However, under such dispensations, while the people in the minority were transposed and made subservient in a new location, the migrated few in the South African case conquered, dominated and subjected the majority to servitude. Race, therefore, formed a centrifugal element in the coexistence of all the racial groups, defined by segregation and exploitation. As the vituperations against this trend best explain the literature in apartheid South Africa, the emerging order in post-apartheid literary engagements has promised a difference. One reflection of such development is the blurring of old racial defining lines as found between Tami and Johan in Zakes Mda‟s The Bells of Amersfoort. This paper,...
Since the fall of apartheid and the emergence of a wholly democratic South Africa in 1994, little research has been done on the topic of white identity in this rapidly transforming multicultural society. Indeed, apart from an array of popular books on the subject, there has been virtually no academic interest in the question of how white South Africans have reconstructed their individual and collective identities since the fall of apartheid, and the resulting erosion of the ready answers previously provided to them regarding questions of belonging and identification. This study set out to remedy this situation through exploring the identities that white South Africans, and white Afrikaans speakers in particular, have constructed out of the wreckage of the 20th century. Embracing a qualitative approach, this study focused on exploring stories of contemporary white Afrikaans speaking identity as told in the participants’ own words. Six individuals, ranging from students in their late teens to a grandson of Hendrik Verwoerd, shared their stories, which were reflexively engaged through an interpretive sociological approach that incorporated elements of phenomenology, existentialism and reflexive sociology. The dissertation starts off with an introduction to the epistemological and ontological foundation upon which the investigative process was built, before investigating the concept identity as conceptualised during the research process, namely as constituting a relatively stable but malleable set of understandings regarding the self and its place within society in general and specific racial, religious and cultural collectivities in particular. A history of white Afrikaans speaking identity is then presented, which makes clear the prior existence of at least three historical white Afrikaans speaking collectivities, namely the Burghers of the 17th and 18th centuries, the Boers of the 1800’s, and the Afrikaners of the 20th century. The stage is then set for the examination of the new collectivities that have developed since the demise of a coherent Afrikaner identity in the late 20th century. The data, collected by means of reflexive individual and group interviews, and analysed using ‘Dialogical Narrative Analysis’ (DNA), a process that focuses on the contents and circulation of individual and collectively shared stories, or ‘narrative repertoires’, indicate the existence of at least three relatively coherent contemporary white Afrikaans speaking collectivities. These are the ‘Pseudo-Boers’, the ‘Afrikaners’, and the ‘Afrikaanses’. These three collectivities, developing simultaneously and largely parallel to each other out of the once coherent Afrikaner collectivity of the previous century, exhibit significant variance regarding the content, structure and circulation of their narrative repertoires. This means that Afrikaners, Pseudo-Boers and Afrikaanses, on both the individual and collective levels, differ from each other in terms of the stories they tell and dynamics pertaining to the circulation of these stories, as well as the genres, plots and character types prevalent in them. These shared stories in turn represent, according to this study, the matrix out of which identity is constructed, be it individual or collective. The uncovered data are further represented in a manner borrowing from certain techniques used in the fields of semi-fiction writing and journalism, with the aim to aid understanding through presenting the data themselves in a storied form. This choice was made in line with the hypothesis, developed throughout this dissertation, that the uniquely human phenomenon of storytelling in fact underlies much of the social construction of reality, and serves to inform individual and collectively shared meaning frameworks and understandings regarding the world of everyday life.
The protean and contested symbols of Zimbabwean literature remain the land and invented heroes, including a hagiographic iconisation of shrines, best seen in the Zimbabwe ruins, the Zimbabwe Bird and the national heroes’ acre. In South African white writings, the symbolic topos has been dominated by prison walls, the hangman’s noose, Robben Island and, in the post-apartheid era, Saartjie Baartman and the imagined rainbow generated through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). The horrors of apartheid are ideographically embodied in Coetzee’s tongueless protagonist, Foe. In both locales, white writings – fictive renditions and auto/biographical – have invited critically legitimated constructs of coherence. This article contends that answers to our present postcolonial crises inhere in the multiplicity of voices, not monological narratives. Diversity, and therefore polyphony, is valued for its ability to suggest multiple ways of seeing and belonging to national imaginaries; its ability to suggest answers to the postcolonial problematic related to memory, heritage and transformation. This article explores how the meanings of cultural objects often display shifting appropriations that garner either symbolic or ephemeral qualities, demonstrating the ability of those in power at different historical junctures to determine and confer minted meanings. In turn, this anxiety and re-membering of space and symbol has a bearing on ownership claims, and gives rise to a choreographed heritage discourse.
This essay analyses the rhetoric of racialised South African discourse. It inquires into apartheid's imagined identity of the 'Afrikaner' and the use of the Bible in the construction of Israel's identity (real or imagined). The imaginary character of Israel's identity enables one to explain South African identity discourse in terms of an unequal dialogue where identity can be overridden as was the case during the colonial period where equality and inequality were created simultaneously. For the postapartheid state, it means that racism can enter through the back door when culture is made to fulfil the role biology once played. What has become crucial in a discourse that replicates old racist polarities, is to refuse the founding concepts of the problematic, i.e. an essentialist identity in favour of a constructedness of identity.
This Land South Africa": rewriting time and space in postapartheid poetry and property
Environment and Planning A, 2001
The widespread concern in recent South African poetry with landscape and the question of what place the poet occupies in that landscape arises less as a response to the turn of the millennium than to the historical end of formal apartheid, but nonetheless marks an epochal shift in sensibility. Whereas much poetry of the 1980s evoked a sense of extreme dislocation in recent time and local space (marked by references to a precarious present of forced removal and migrancy, and unspecified, unsettled futures), some significant recent work has been marked by a desire to relocate the human presence in South Africa in terms of geological time and continental space. This generalization needs to be qualified by reference to racial and political positioning within South Africa, and in this paper I distinguish between the work of committed white writers such as ex-political-prisoner Jeremy Cronin (now Secretary of the South African Communist Party) and Barry Feinberg (now curator of the Mayibu...