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 on his own family’s story and others, Roos explores how working-class whites frequently defied particular aspects of the apartheid state but seldom opposed or even acknowledged the idea of racial supremacy, which lay at the heart of apartheid society. This cognitive dissonance afforded them a way to simultaneously accommodate and oppose apartheid and allowed them to later claim they never supported the apartheid system. Ordinary Whites in Apartheid Society offers a telling reminder that the politics and practice of race, in this case apartheid-era whiteness, derive not only from the top, but also from the bottom.

NEIL ROOS

Neil Roos is Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities at the University of Fort Hare. He is also one of the lead implementers of the South African Department of Higher Education and Training’s national collaborative Future Professors Programme (FPP), which is committed to excellence and transformation, runs across all disciplines, and aims to fast-track early career professional scholars in the South African higher education system towards the professoriate. Roos took his doctoral degree in history at the University of North West, an institution on South African’s rural periphery. He writes on histories of race, and his recent research has focused on the historical, moral and political dimensions of white everyday life in apartheid South Africa. From this body of work, he has published essays in Social History, the Journal of Social History, The Historical Journal and International Review of Social History, and he has a book entitled Ordinary Whites in Apartheid Society forthcoming from Indiana University Press. He has recently written on contemporary iterations of whiteness, white racial identity, masculinity and racial violence in South Africa. Roos is also interested in historiography and theory, especially the theoretical moorings of a post-Marxist, left wing social history.

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