Interracial Intimacy in Apartheid and Post-Apartheid South Africa
Date of Award
2008
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Bachelors
Department
Social Sciences
Second Department
Humanities
First Advisor
Baram, Uzi
Keywords
Apartheid, Post-Apartheid, South Africa, Race, Interracial Intimacy
Area of Concentration
Gender and Ethnicity Studies
Abstract
This thesis examines the significance of regulating interracial intimacy in twentieth-century South Africa. Utilizing an interdisciplinary methodology, it draws together evidence from newspaper clippings, police reports, internal bureaucratic communications, personal letters, and fiction to build an archive that adequately describes intimate domains of people's lives, including whom they love and with whom they have sex. The scope of state intervention in these most intimate aspects of people's lives suggests that intimate domains are contested sites for making race and gender. In South Africa, how interracial intimacy was discussed, policed, and punished reveals much about the narrative production of "whiteness" in the years preceding apartheid, during apartheid, and post-apartheid. Since mechanisms of gender-ing and race-ing are both at work in the narrative production of whiteness, white men and white women are positioned differently within 'whiteness'. Campaign posters, letters, and bureaucratic correspondence reveal how the threat of interracial intimacy between white women and black men was deployed in the narrative production of a patriarchal whiteness that buttressed the apartheid system. J.M. Coetzee's postapartheid novel Disgrace explores interracial intimacy as central to the process of re-narrating whiteness in the New South Africa.
Recommended Citation
Blignaut, Salome, "Interracial Intimacy in Apartheid and Post-Apartheid South Africa" (2008). Theses & ETDs. 3908.
https://digitalcommons.ncf.edu/theses_etds/3908
Rights
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