Politics and Society in South Africa

Politics and Society in South Africa
Author: Daryl Glaser
Publisher: SAGE
Total Pages: 301
Release: 2000-12-22
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1446264270

`Darryl Glaser supplies an illuminating overview of the scholarship since 1970 on South Africa′s political history. His emphasis is on the debates between liberals, Marxists, and to a lesser extent "post-structuralists" about the origins and the course of South Africa′s racial order′ - Tom Lodge, University of Witwatersrand `A well-researched, well-argued, readable, interesting, informative and competent study′ - Capital and Class Providing a wide-ranging and critical introduction to contemporary South Africa, this book uses an interdisciplinary lens to introduce the student to the main debates, historical context, and issues that have characterized the study of South Africa over the last three decades. Key topics include: the role of colonialism, capitalism and modernity in the formation of the racial order; changes in the South African state; questions of class, race and ehtnicity; black resistance; and the transition to democracy. A number of underlying debates are critically evaluated. For exmple, the contribution of materialist and class-analytic approaches, the application of post-structuralism and theories of modernity, and the prospects for democratic liberalism and socialism in post-apartheid South Africa.

Making Race and Nation

Making Race and Nation
Author: Anthony W. Marx
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 530
Release: 1997-12-28
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1139936204

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.

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.

Waste of a White Skin

Waste of a White Skin
Author: Tiffany Willoughby-Herard
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 324
Release: 2015-01-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 0520280873

A pathbreaking history of the development of scientific racism, white nationalism, and segregationist philanthropy in the U.S. and South Africa in the early twentieth century, Waste of a White Skin focuses on the American Carnegie Corporation’s study of race in South Africa, the Poor White Study, and its influence on the creation of apartheid. This book demonstrates the ways in which U.S. elites supported apartheid and Afrikaner Nationalism in the critical period prior to 1948 through philanthropic interventions and shaping scholarly knowledge production. Rather than comparing racial democracies and their engagement with scientific racism, Willoughby-Herard outlines the ways in which a racial regime of global whiteness constitutes domestic racial policies and in part animates black consciousness in seemingly disparate and discontinuous racial democracies. This book uses key paradigms in black political thought—black feminism, black internationalism, and the black radical tradition—to provide a rich account of poverty and work. Much of the scholarship on whiteness in South Africa overlooks the complex politics of white poverty and what they mean for the making of black political action and black people’s presence in the economic system. Ideal for students, scholars, and interested readers in areas related to U.S. History, African History, World History, Diaspora Studies, Race and Ethnicity, Sociology, Anthropology, and Political Science.

Race, Nature, and the Politics of Difference

Race, Nature, and the Politics of Difference
Author: Donald S. Moore
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 487
Release: 2003-05-20
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0822384655

How do race and nature work as terrains of power? From eighteenth-century claims that climate determined character to twentieth-century medical debates about the racial dimensions of genetic disease, concepts of race and nature are integrally connected, woven into notions of body, landscape, and nation. Yet rarely are these complex entanglements explored in relation to the contemporary cultural politics of difference. This volume takes up that challenge. Distinguished contributors chart the traffic between race and nature across sites including rainforests, colonies, and courtrooms. Synthesizing a number of fields—anthropology, cultural studies, and critical race, feminist, and postcolonial theory—this collection analyzes diverse historical, cultural, and spatial locations. Contributors draw on thinkers such as Fanon, Foucault, and Gramsci to investigate themes ranging from exclusionary notions of whiteness and wilderness in North America to linguistic purity in Germany. Some essayists focus on the racialized violence of imperial rule and evolutionary science and the biopolitics of race and class in the Guatemalan civil war. Others examine how race and nature are fused in biogenetic discourse—in the emergence of “racial diseases” such as sickle cell anemia, in a case of mistaken in vitro fertilization in which a white couple gave birth to a black child, and even in the world of North American dog breeding. Several essays tackle the politics of representation surrounding environmental justice movements, transnational sex tourism, and indigenous struggles for land and resource rights in Indonesia and Brazil. Contributors. Bruce Braun, Giovanna Di Chiro, Paul Gilroy, Steven Gregory, Donna Haraway, Jake Kosek, Tania Murray Li, Uli Linke, Zine Magubane, Donald S. Moore, Diane Nelson, Anand Pandian, Alcida Rita Ramos, Keith Wailoo, Robyn Wiegman