Afrikaners in post-apartheid South Africa: Inward migration and enclave nationalism

HTS Teologiese Studies/Theological Studies

 
 
Field Value
 
Title Afrikaners in post-apartheid South Africa: Inward migration and enclave nationalism
 
Creator van der Westhuizen, Christi
 
Subject — Postapartheid South Africa; space; Afrikaner identity; postnationalism; race; class; gender; sexuality; consumption
Description South Africa’s transition to democracy coincided and interlinked with massive global shifts, including the fall of communism and the rise of western capitalist triumphalism. Late capitalism operates through paradoxical global-local dynamics, both universalising identities and expanding local particularities. The erstwhile hegemonic identity of apartheid, ‘the Afrikaner’, was a product of Afrikaner nationalism. Like other identities, it was spatially organised, with Afrikaner nationalism projecting its imagined community (‘the volk’) onto a national territory (‘white South Africa’). The study traces the neo-nationalist spatial permutations of ‘the Afrikaner’, following Massey’s (2005) understanding of space as (1) political, (2) produced through interrelations ranging from the global to micro intimacies, (3) potentially a sphere for heterogeneous co-existence, and (4) continuously created. Research is presented that shows a neo-nationalist revival of ethnic privileges in a defensive version of Hall’s ‘return to the local’ (1997a). Although Afrikaner nationalism’s territorial claims to a nation state were defeated, neo-nationalist remnants reclaim a purchase on white Afrikaans identities, albeit in shrunken territories. This phenomenon is, here, called Afrikaner enclave nationalism. Drawing on a global revamping of race as a category of social subjugation, a strategy is deployed that is here called ‘inward migration’. These dynamics produce a privatised micro-apartheid in sites ranging from homes, to commercial and religious enterprises, to suburbs. Virtual white spaces in the form of Afrikaans media products serve as extensions of these whitened locales. The lynchpin holding it all together is the heteronormative, middle-class family, with consumption the primary mode of the generation of its white comfort zones.
 
Publisher AOSIS
 
Contributor
Date 2016-08-26
 
Type info:eu-repo/semantics/article info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion — —
Format text/html application/octet-stream text/xml application/pdf
Identifier 10.4102/hts.v72i4.3351
 
Source HTS Teologiese Studies / Theological Studies; Vol 72, No 4 (2016); 9 pages 2072-8050 0259-9422
 
Language eng
 
Relation
The following web links (URLs) may trigger a file download or direct you to an alternative webpage to gain access to a publication file format of the published article:

https://hts.org.za/index.php/hts/article/view/3351/7803 https://hts.org.za/index.php/hts/article/view/3351/7804 https://hts.org.za/index.php/hts/article/view/3351/7805 https://hts.org.za/index.php/hts/article/view/3351/7683
 
Coverage — — —
Rights Copyright (c) 2016 Christi van der Westhuizen https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
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