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.

Historians teach us that in South Africa’s colonial and apartheid history, race was made and maintained through the violent regulation of sex, intimacy and familial love; that to understand Afrikaner whiteness and the violence it unleashed in this place, one has to understand the white Afrikaner family, the rules it lays down for sex, intimacy and gendered subjectivity. In a postapartheid moment where the promise of “post” keeps receding, I trace some of the ways in which we as white Afrikaner people continue to carry these scripts in our bodies, how they orient us in the world in ways that keep us separate, landed and apart. In answer, I turn to desire as an affective force that can send us off track, change who we are, a destabilising pull that can unmake the white self and forge the world anew.

AZILLE COETZEE

Azille Coetzee is a writer and a research fellow 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, and she is the writer of the academic monograph Desire at the End of the White Line: Notes on the Decolonisation of White Afrikaner Femininity (2025, UKZN University Press).

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