Critical Engagements with Histories of Whiteness Series

In providing a nuanced dissection of the realities of racialisation across the expanse of South Africa’s pasts, this seminar series seeks to explore the makings of racialised whiteness as individual and collective identity. While steering away from a simplified analysis of white lived experiences in a historically racialised society, this series seeks to understand how whiteness was simultaneously afforded great privilege, policed and disciplined. Moreover, this series seeks to expose the ways in which markers of idealised whiteness have been transferred, transformed and reconfigured over time.  In doing so, we seek to track expressions and experiences of whiteness today, considering the current state of the global political landscape. In placing histories of racialised whiteness within the context of South African historiography more broadly, this series also occupies itself with the contemporary implications surrounding processes of racialisation and race-making in South Africa.

Drawing form her latest publication, Desire at the End of the White Line, Azille Coetzee examines a range of contemporary Afrikaans popular culture texts to demonstrate how the stories that white Afrikaans women tell about themselves keep them white and apart. “In this book I ask: what would happen if she were to go against the path laid out for her, if she were to want something else? What openings emerge for the unmaking or becoming different of Afrikaner whiteness if we as white women could start narrating ourselves outside of the love plot of heterosexual nuclearity, white genealogy? What new lines of connection, points of contact and ways of being unfurl if we change our story and become willing to reimagine the social structures and networks of intimacy within which we become who we are?” from the introduction

AZILLE COETZEE

Azille Coetzee is a postdoctoral researcher at Stellenbosch University. In her work she explores the relationship between gender and race in colonial logic, and the role of gender liberation in the project of decolonisation. Her research is published in various international feminist journals, like Hypatia, Feminist Review, and the European Journal of Women’s Studies. She is the writer of a work of creative non-fiction In My Vel: ’n Reis (2019, Tafelberg Publishers) in which she explores white Afrikaner identity and national belonging; and a novel Die Teenoorgestelde is Net So Waar (2021, Human & Rousseau), about female friendship, queer love, and alternative modes of kinship.

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