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.

Susanne M. Klausen

Susanne M. Klausen is the Julia Gregg Brill Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at The Pennsylvania State University. Her main areas of research are the history of fertility politics in modern South Africa, nationalism and sexuality, and transnational movements for reproductive justice. She is the author of Race, Maternity, and the Politics of Birth Control in South Africa, 1910-1939 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) and Abortion Under Apartheid: Nationalism, Sexuality, and Women’s Reproductive Rights in South Africa (Oxford University Press, 2015) that won the Women’s History Prize awarded by the Canadian Committee on Women’s History (2016) and the Joel Gregory Prize awarded by the Canadian Association of African Studies (2016). Prof Klausen has published articles in a range of scholarly journals and is currently writing a monograph on the criminalization of interracial heterosex in South Africa during apartheid.

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