Framing the Race in South Africa

Framing the Race in South Africa
Author: Karen E. Ferree
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 315
Release: 2010-11-15
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1139494767

Post-apartheid South African elections have borne an unmistakable racial imprint: Africans vote for one set of parties, whites support a different set of parties, and, with few exceptions, there is no crossover voting between groups. These voting tendencies have solidified the dominance of the ruling African National Congress (ANC) over South African politics and turned South African elections into 'racial censuses'. This book explores the political sources of these outcomes. It argues that although the beginnings of these patterns lie in South Africa's past, in the effects apartheid had on voters' beliefs about race and destiny and the reputations parties forged during this period, the endurance of the census reflects the ruling party's ability to use the powers of office to prevent the opposition from evolving away from its apartheid-era party label. By keeping key opposition parties 'white', the ANC has rendered them powerless, solidifying its hold on power in spite of an increasingly restive and dissatisfied electorate.

Framing Africa

Framing Africa
Author: Nigel Eltringham
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 192
Release: 2013-06-01
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1782380744

The first decade of the 21st century has seen a proliferation of North American and European films that focus on African politics and society. While once the continent was the setting for narratives of heroic ascendancy over self (The African Queen, 1951; The Snows of Kilimanjaro, 1952), military odds (Zulu, 1964; Khartoum, 1966) and nature (Mogambo, 1953; Hatari!,1962; Born Free, 1966; The Last Safari, 1967), this new wave of films portrays a continent blighted by transnational corruption (The Constant Gardener, 2005), genocide (Hotel Rwanda, 2004; Shooting Dogs, 2006), ‘failed states’ (Black Hawk Down, 2001), illicit transnational commerce (Blood Diamond, 2006) and the unfulfilled promises of decolonization (The Last King of Scotland, 2006). Conversely, where once Apartheid South Africa was a brutal foil for the romance of East Africa (Cry Freedom, 1987; A Dry White Season, 1989), South Africa now serves as a redeemed contrast to the rest of the continent (Red Dust, 2004; Invictus, 2009). Writing from the perspective of long-term engagement with the contexts in which the films are set, anthropologists and historians reflect on these films and assess the contemporary place Africa holds in the North American and European cinematic imagination.

Constructing Race

Constructing Race
Author: Nadine E. Dolby
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 176
Release: 2001-08-30
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0791490041

As apartheid crumbled in South Africa, racial identity was thrown into question. Based on a year-long ethnographic study of a multiracial high school in Durban, this book explores how youth make meaning of the still powerful, yet changing, idea of race. In a world saturated with media images and global commodities, fashion and music become charged, polarized racial identifiers. As youth engage with this world, race simultaneously persists and falters, providing us with a glimpse into the future of race both within South Africa and throughout urban youth cultures worldwide.

Unsettled History

Unsettled History
Author: Leslie Witz
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 329
Release: 2017-02-27
Genre: History
ISBN: 0472053345

An engrossing look at how history has been produced, contested, and unsettled in South Africa from Mandela's release to 2010.

Safari Nation

Safari Nation
Author: Jacob S. T. Dlamini
Publisher: Ohio University Press
Total Pages: 420
Release: 2020-04-22
Genre: History
ISBN: 0821440888

Safari Nation opens new lines of inquiry in the study of national parks in Africa and the rest of the world. The Kruger National Park is South Africa’s most iconic nature reserve, renowned for its rich flora and fauna. According to author Jacob Dlamini, there is another side to the park, a social history neglected by scholars and popular writers alike in which blacks (meaning Africans, Coloureds, and Indians) occupy center stage. Safari Nation details the ways in which black people devoted energies to conservation and to the park over the course of the twentieth century—engagement that transcends the stock (black) figure of the laborer and the poacher. By exploring the complex and dynamic ways in which blacks of varying class, racial, religious, and social backgrounds related to the Kruger National Park, and with the help of previously unseen archival photographs, Dlamini’s narrative also sheds new light on how and why Africa’s national parks—often derided by scholars as colonial impositions—survived the end of white rule on the continent. Relying on oral histories, photographs, and archival research, Safari Nation engages both with African historiography and with ongoing debates about the “land question,” democracy, and citizenship in South Africa.

Knowledge in the Blood

Knowledge in the Blood
Author: Jonathan D. Jansen
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 360
Release: 2009
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0804761949

Discusses how white South African students learn and confront their Apartheid past, and explores how this knowledge transforms both the students and the author, the first black dean of an historically white university.

Race, Nation, Translation

Race, Nation, Translation
Author: Zoë Wicomb
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 384
Release: 2018-11-20
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 0300241151

The first collection of nonfiction critical writings by one of the leading literary figures of post-apartheid South Africa The most significant nonfiction writings of Zoë Wicomb, one of South Africa’s leading authors and intellectuals, are collected here for the first time in a single volume. This compilation features critical essays on the works of such prominent South African writers as Bessie Head, Nadine Gordimer, Njabulo Ndebele, and J. M. Coetzee, as well as writings on gender politics, race, identity, visual art, sexuality, and a wide range of other cultural and political topics. Also included are a reflection on Nelson Mandela and a revealing interview with Wicomb. In these essays, written between 1990 and 2013, Wicomb offers insight on her nation’s history, policies, and people. In a world in which nationalist rhetoric is on the rise and diversity and pluralism are the declared enemies of right-wing populist movements, her essays speak powerfully to a wide range of international issues.

Race for Education

Race for Education
Author: Mark Hunter
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 325
Release: 2019-01-24
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1108480527

An examination of families and schools in South Africa, revealing how the marketisation of schooling works to uphold the privilege of whiteness.

Making Race and Nation

Making Race and Nation
Author: Anthony W. Marx
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 420
Release: 1998-10-28
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780521585903

Why and how has race become a central aspect of politics during this century? This book addresses this pressing question by comparing South African apartheid and resistance to it, the United States Jim Crow law and protests against it, and the myth of racial democracy in Brazil. Anthony Marx argues that these divergent experiences had roots in the history of slavery, colonialism, miscegenation and culture, but were fundamentally shaped by impediments and efforts to build national unity. In South Africa and the United States, ethnic or regional conflicts among whites were resolved by unifying whites and excluding blacks, while Brazil's longer established national unity required no such legal racial crutch. Race was thus central to projects of nation-building, and nationalism shaped uses of race. Professor Marx extends this argument to explain popular protest and the current salience of issues of race.