(2022) review Henkes' Negotiating Racial Politics in the Family by Elsbeth Locher-Scholten (original) (raw)
Related papers
Review of International Studies, 2020
This article seeks to advance our understanding of how intimate relations and racial logics are co-constituted and matter-subjectively, culturally, materially, and politically-in our colonial present of economic inequalities, nationalist populisms, anti-migrant discourses and xenophobic hostilities. Addressing these crisis conditions is urgent, yet critical interventions indicate that prevailing accounts inadequately address the scale, complexity, and fluidity of racisms operating today. This article proposes to think racial logics 'otherwise' by drawing on interdisciplinary scholarship and intersectional analytics to produce a genealogy of state/nation formation processes, imperial encounters, and legitimating ideologies that illuminates how 'intimacy builds worlds'. 1 A deep history of political centralisation reveals that regulation of intimate, familial relations is a constitutive feature of successful state-making and crucial for understanding how modernity's 'race difference' is produced and how the racialisation of 'Other' ('non-European', undesirable) sexual/familial practices figures in contemporary crises. Locating intimate relations-'family'-in (birthright) citizenship, immigration regimes, and political-economic frames helps clarify the amplification of global inequalities and the power of stigmatisations to fuel nationalist attachments and anti-migrant hostilities. Foregrounding intimacy and integrating typically disparate lines of inquiry advances our analyses of today's often opaque yet intense racisms and their globally problematic effects.
South African Historical Journal, 2013
This article examines how the politics of Apartheid manifested themselves in networks that connected South Africa and the Netherlands. It analyses the transfer of narratives, images, ideas and political practices within a transnational kinship network, as well as through networks of political activists in both countries and worldwide. The footage a Dutch documentary maker shot during the 1980s, especially his focus on his well-established, ‘white’ relatives from South Africa and their encounters with ‘black’ compatriots, is used to trace these transnational dynamics. His material reveals the various narratives and markers of whiteness by which his relatives presented their privileged position in Apartheid South Africa as ‘normal’, while interviews with the filmmaker and some of his relatives in South Africa and the Netherlands some 25 years later give insights in how their performances were reshaped and received as ‘abnormal’ within the Dutch political context at the time. The post-apartheid memory work involved, show how the political and moral dilemmas are still felt to this day.
Mixed Race Families in South Africa: Naming and Claiming a Location
Journal of Intercultural Studies
The very act of living across racial boundaries or borders is a challenge to existing ideologies and social structures. Through in depth interviews with ten South Africans, I explore the border patrolling or policing of people who cross race lines in intimate relationships. Interracial partners are concerned with safety and comfort in public places and in the role of parent, they are concerned about their children's sense of belonging. As interracial parents and partners resist border patrolling, they are also resisting racial categories, even as they claim and name locations that may work to reproduce racialisation. The experiences and perspectives of interracial parents and partners presented in this article suggest that racism and other forms of inequality remain entrenched and pervasive. And, despite the dream of unity and non-racialism, inequality between racial groups and classes has grown under neoliberalism in South Africa [Bond, P., 2004. From Racial to Class Apartheid: South Africa's Frustrating Decade of Freedom. Monthly Review, 55 (10), 45. Available from: https:// monthlyreview.org/2004/03/01/south-africas-frustrating-decadeoffreedom-from-racial-to-class-apartheid/] Far from the hope for a rainbow nation the experiences of interracial partners and parents show that race remains significant, hierarchical and defining of ideologies, identities and institution. The interviews highlight that borders of racial categories are contested and charged spaces.
Families on the color-line: patrolling borders and crossing boundaries
Race and Society, 2002
Multiracial couples and families are becoming increasingly more common, yet opposition to these relationships still exists even if it is often hidden in color-blind language. In this lingering societal opposition to black-white unions, the strongest opposition often comes from the couples' families. The social institution of the family plays an integral role in reproducing the dominant ideologies of race that exist in society, and more specifically a racialized discourse that actively discourages interracial unions. Families reproduce racial boundaries, by patrolling who their members can and cannot become involved with. In our society where group membership is all-important and identity is based primarily on one's racial group, families object to individuals from different "racial" groups redefining themselves apart from their racial identities. Drawing from in-depth interviews with black-white couples, the responses of their white and black families will be explored to illustrate how families express opposition to black-white interracial relationships. In both white and black families, certain discourses are used when discussing black-white relationships that reproduce the image of these unions as different, deviant, even dangerous. Interracial relationships and marriage often bring forth certain racialized attitudes and beliefs about family and identity which otherwise are not expressed.
UNHINGING THE NATIONAL FRAMEWORK. Perspectives on transnational life writing , 2020
This chapter explores how a series of letters from a Dutch migrant woman can help us to understand how practices of race – its meaning and performance in daily life – changed when moving from the post-war Netherlands to apartheid South Africa. From her observations, as they are presented in the weekly letters to her parents in Amsterdam, it is possible to further develop new lines of inquiry that facilitate a transnational perspective on ‘doing race’ and different forms of racism in the postcolonial Netherlands and South Africa in the 1950s.
Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race , 2024
In this article, I examine how the fear of miscegenation developed as a raison d'être for the construction and maintenance of apartheid. I argue that despite its efficacy at reproducing racial-caste formations, miscegenation taboo ultimately undermined its own hegemonic mythology by constructing contradictory erotic desires and subjectivities which could neither be governed nor contained. I consider how miscegenation fears and fantasies were debated in public discourse, enacted into law, institutionalized through draconian policing and punishment practices, culturally entrenched, yet negotiated and resisted through everyday intimacies. While crime statistics show that most incidences of interracial sex involved White men and women of color, the perceived threat to "White purity" was generally represented through images of White women-volks-mothers and daughters-in the Afrikaner nationalist iconography. White women's wombs symbolized the future of "Whiteness." This article offers a critique of the prevailing South African "exceptionalism" paradigm in apartheid studies. Detailed analyses of government commission reports (1939, 1984, 1985) and parliamentary debate records (1949) reveal considerable American influence on South Africa's "petty apartheid" laws, and especially the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act (1949) and Immorality Amendment Act (1950). While these "cornerstone" policies of apartheid developed from local socio-political conflicts and economic tensions, they were always entangled in global racial formations, rooted in transoceanic histories of slavery, dispossession, and segregation. This historical anthropological study of race/sex taboo builds on interdisciplinary literatures in colonial history, sociology, postcolonial studies, literary theory, art history, cultural studies, feminist theory, queer studies, and critical race theory.
Apartheid politics and ‘coloured’ identity in Nadine Gordimer’s My Son’s Story (1990)
Routledge, 2024
This paper addresses apartheid political history and ‘coloured’ identity challenges in South African society. A textual analysis of Nadine Gordimer’s My Son’s Story (MSS, 1990) adheres to understanding ‘coloured’ identity struggle as an ‘Other’ and their racial marginality during apartheid. This research deeply studies race and identity theories with Frantz Fanon’s psychological notion of racism, decolonisation and the idea of cross-racial relations are important to analyse MSS. A textual study of MSS is significant for examining the impact of apartheid on ‘coloured’ characters. This research finds that ‘coloured’ community’s struggle and their racial consciousness of being other were political and psychological challenges during apartheid time. To put in a nutshell, apartheid stories are not individual representations but these are collectively representing the ‘coloured’ community's struggle in South Africa. Racial consciousness of being other was a form of racial exclusion so, a discussion on ‘coloured’ discourse becomes important to contextualise political history. The negligence of the ‘coloured’ issues during apartheid questioned the psychological development of ‘coloured’.
The Mothers and Fathers of the Sociology of Race and Ethnicity: Learning from Them in Eight Lessons
Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, 2020
Editorial Feature Review: It takes a village to raise a child. This African proverb is most appropriate here. From the beginning, Sociology of Race and Ethnicity (SRE) has been a collective enterprise, one nurtured by the members of the Section of Racial and Ethnic Minorities (SREM) of the American Sociological Association (ASA). The success of the journal is the result of the cumula-tion of knowledge and wisdom from great scholars upon whose shoulders we stand, and within whose footsteps we step with great respect. It is also testimony to all the great scholarship SRE has received and published since opening its portal for submissions in 2014. When the editors of SRE set out on the journey to make a home for new, engaging, and cutting edge publications, we did so without a clear definition of what a "sociology of race and ethnicity" was or even what it would look like. As racism scholars ourselves, we only knew that it was interdisci-plinary and that while so much had already been said, there was still so much left to say. We also knew, early on from ASA SREM members, that we were to keep front and center the fact that the ground had significantly been laid by some of the most formidable race/racism and ethnicity scholars out there. This review pays homage to the mothers and fathers of the sociology of race and ethnicity. In the following, we lay out the methodology we used to survey 64 race and ethnicity scholars for this review. We then present eight lessons that stood out from the collected data. Although the topics were 975579S REXXX10.1177/2332649220975579Sociology of Race and EthnicityBrunsma et al. research-Abstract In this Editorial Feature Review, we reached out to senior race/racism and ethnicity scholars who have theoretically, epistemologically, and empirically contributed in major ways to what we now call the sociology of race and ethnicity. We wanted to pay our respects to these mothers and fathers of the discipline and the gifts that they have given our discipline over their careers. Our review was guided by a set of six key questions that cover their views of the field in the early parts of their careers, their experiences along the way, their views of what is going on now in the discipline, and their advice and suggestions to those currently practicing sociologies of race and ethnicity. We highlight eight major lessons from central scholars who have inspired generations of academics and whose leadership, mentorship, and scholarship, will never be forgotten.