Critical Engagements with Histories of Whiteness
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.
Past Seminars
The Treacherous Blood-Mixer: Policing White Male Desire under Apartheid
Professor Susanne Klausen’s lecture, “Policing the Desire of the Treacherous ‘Blood-Mixer’,” was a powerful examination of apartheid’s moral panic over interracial intimacy and the state’s brutal attempts to manage white masculinity in service of [...]
Ordinary Whites in Apartheid Society: Social Histories of Accommodation – Prof Neil Roos
With calm conviction and rich narrative texture, Professor Neil Roos took his audience through a layered excavation of white complicity in apartheid South Africa, drawing from his recent book Ordinary Whites in Apartheid Society: [...]
Desire at the End of the White Line
In a deeply moving and intellectually rigorous talk, Dr Azille Coetzee brought to life the core questions of her recent work, Desire at the End of the White Line: Notes on the Decolonisation of [...]
Inscribing Citizenship onto the White Body
Dr Anell Stacey Daries delivered a provocative lecture on the intersections of physical education, nationalism, and the body, focusing on the role of the Physical Training Battalion in shaping ideals of citizenship in mid-twentieth-century [...]
LISTEN
Policing the Desire of the Treacherous ‘Blood-Mixer’ – Prof Susanne Klausen
Prof Susanne Klausen traces the apartheid state’s obsession with suppressing interracial sex between white men and black women, revealing how Afrikaner nationalism relied on a punitive, puritanical masculinity to preserve its imagined racial order. Drawing [...]
Ordinary Whites in Apartheid Society: Social Histories of Accommodation
Prof Neil Roos discusses how whiteness operated not only through state violence but also via the bureaucratic disciplining of the white working class. Drawing on archival material and personal memory, he illuminates how apartheid’s structures [...]
Desire at the End of the White Line: Notes on the Decolonisation of White Afrikaner Femininity
Dr Azille Coetzee speaks with remarkable vulnerability and intellectual clarity about the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality within white Afrikaner identity. Drawing on personal memoir and theoretical inquiry, she examines how the apartheid regime [...]
Inscribing Citizenship onto the White Body
This episode delves into the racialised logic of physical education in twentieth-century South Africa and its entanglement with whiteness, nationalism and citizenship. Dr Anell Stacey Daries examines the history of the Physical Training Battalion [...]