Ongoing contestations: the use of racial signifiers in post-apartheid South Africa

Despite hopes for the development of a non-racial citizenry in South Africa, race remains a salient factor in identity claims. Much of the recent literature has focused on issues of black and white identities or on discussions of the reification or erasure of racial identities. This paper addresses questions of coloured identity in South Africa to explore the ways in which these identities are formed through iterative processes and continually in flux. Through a series of vignettes I argue that identity claims are frequently incomplete, uncertain and reworked in different and changing contexts. I highlight the shortcomings of ideas of erasure and reification when analysing identity claims and argue for a more nuanced approach that provides for consideration of post-apartheid racial identities as complex, dynamic and contested.     

Indian identities in the ‘rainbow nation’: Responses to transformation in South African schools

Ethnic minorities pose important challenges for nation-building in post-apartheid South Africa. Indian/black African accommodation is examined through the microcosm of former Indian secondary schools in Pietermaritzburg. The development of Indian identities since the beginnings of indenture in the 1860s reflects an accommodation along predominantly ethnic rather than class-based lines. Whereas the shared educational experience of Indians under apartheid has served to reinforce ascribed ‘Indian’ identity, internal divisions are reflected in fragmented Indian voting behaviour since 1994. Fieldwork on patterns of desegregation in five former Indian secondary schools reveals critical differences between staff and governing bodies committed to transformation and more narrowly focused concerns of often conservative or apolitical parents. These differences are consistent with historic socio-political divisions among Indian South Africans. Transformation of former Indian schools embraces challenges, which, if successfully negotiated, could help to enable Indians to forge an identity of their own making in post-apartheid South Africa.     

Transcending apartheid in higher education: transforming an institutional culture

Twenty years after Nelson Mandela became President of South Africa, deeply entrenched inequalities and injustices are still at the core of the country’s social fabric. South Africa’s public and private sectors continue to battle with the situation and higher education institutions are no exception. The South African Ministry of Education has identified systemic problems within the institutional cultures of universities as one of the key obstacles to change. This article focuses on a racist incident that occurred at the University of the Free State (UFS) in South Africa in 2007. The incident shook the university’s institutional culture to the core and became a catalyst for change for universities across the country. We portray the institutional culture of the UFS on the basis of a series of interviews with management and student leaders who personally played key roles in handling the incident in 2008. The interviews reveal some of the ‘story stock’ within the institutional culture and highlight four interrelated dimensions of contestation. The stories also show that the interviewees frequently situate and justify their beliefs and actions in an intergenerational chain. Finally we consider some of the implications of our findings for the ongoing reconstruction of post-apartheid institutional cultures in higher education.     

How critical is the event? Multicultural Norway after 22 July 2011

It is commonly assumed that insecurity experienced by citizens in the wake of a terror attack gives rise to public demands for strong countermeasures, which political leaders must respond to. This article asks how Norwegian society was affected by the 22 July 2011 attacks against the government office complex in Oslo and Labour Party youth camp on Utøya. Combining quantitative and qualitative methods, it analyses political impact, examining post-22 July public debates and related policymaking. A dataset of newspaper op-eds and commentaries was created to determine the significance of key issues debated in the print media after the attacks, and changes over time in the intensity of debates. Key issues were then followed up in a qualitative analysis of policy implications. The study further investigated the discursive framing of the attacks, and the problems and possible solutions evoked in the debates. Was this a ‘critical event’ as Veena Das has theorised, bringing about new sorts of action through the reworking of traditional categories, codes or meanings? Public security emerges as the key frame within which the 22 July attacks have been debated. Arguments over police reforms and alleged inaction by authorities stand out as the most lasting debate.     

Understanding the magnitude and extent of crime in post-apartheid South Africa

The crime of apartheid (1951–1994) was predicated upon the spatial segregation of the country's diverse population according to certain state-defined racial groups. This socio-spatial redesign not only racialised South African cities but led to the concentrated disadvantage of the majority black population in certain segregated geographical areas. Despite democracy, apartheid's urban spatiality has not automatically dissolved but rather continues to shape and define the urban landscape. This article argues that these macro-social patterns of racial and spatial inequalities, borne out of repressively enforced apartheid-era segregationist policies, can be used to explain the magnitude and extent of crime in post-apartheid South Africa. Policing and developmental policy implications of this argument are outlined and discussed, and strategic recommendations are made for the future.     

National identity and regional development: Cornwall and the campaign for Objective 1 funding

The politics of identity is important within regional and governance policy debates, becoming a mechanism for ‘filling in’ the democratic gaps left by the hollowing out of the state, with much discourse about constructing identities for governance purposes. This raises questions about the feasibility of processes of identity construction, and whether it starts from new, or builds on existing identities. We use the case study of the Cornish campaign for Objective 1 EU structural funding, engaging directly with modernist versus ethnosymbolist accounts of nationalism, to explore the binary between instrumental, constructed identities and more phenomenological accounts.     

Coloured South Africans: a middleman minority of another kind

Beginning in the 1940s, a literature on middleman minorities emerged to demystify the intermediary economic niche that Jews had occupied in medieval Europe. They were viewed as ethnic entrepreneurs occupying the economic status gap. In the 1960s, scholars began to systematically apply middleman minority theory to colonial societies and to American society. South Africa also has classic middleman minorities: immigrants from South Asia. This article identifies Coloured South Africans as a middleman minority of another type: semi-privileged proletarians. It also offers a typology contrasting ethnic entrepreneurs to semi-privileged proletarians.     

Abstruse and Insecure? Irish Immigrant Identity in Modern Scotland

This paper will look at the religious and political identities that for many people have come to characterize Scottish football. Such a characterization is particularly evident in the case of the two major clubs in Scotland; the 'Old Firm ' of Glasgow Rangers and Celtic. Nonetheless, Scotland is not unique in its sport acquiring an extrasporting dimension and football in particular often has broader political resonance. As Hoberman opines (in Sugden and Bairner, 1993, p. 10), sport has no intrinsic value structure, but it is a ready and flexible vehicle through which ideological associations can be reinforced. Put another way, sport can becom e an important pointer to features of the wider society. It can reflect both the positive and negative features of a society as well as feed aspects of those features. For many people, sport, particularly football, has acquired the capacity to become both a source for, and a reflection of, important social, political and cultural identities. This article argues that such identities are intrinsic to Scottish football. Football is also sym ptomatic of the ongoing conflicts of identity that have become important to Scottish life, especially since the influx of Catholic im migrants from Ireland began in the middle of the nineteenth century.     

‘Love beyond colour’: the formation of interracial gay men's intimate relationships in post-apartheid South Africa

Arguably, family sociology has witnessed a paradigm shift from a general view of family as a monolithic entity to recognising family pluralism in the last few decades. Recognition and appreciation of diversities such as race, class and gender are at the forefront of this change. This shift includes the construction of day-to-day lives of same-sex households. It should be mentioned that feminist scholars have made important contributions to the role and position of women in families, but lesser contribution has been made to same-sex families' research. Similarly, it has been argued that same-sex family research is one of the important aspects of family scholarship that has not been adequately explored and it is yet to make a serious impact in family studies. In recognition of this gap in family sociology, this study contributes to the existing literature on the emerging familial construction of same-sex households. This study explores the political transition that led to the current visibility of gay identity and interracial intimate relationships that were previously subjugated during apartheid in South Africa. The study is based on an eight-month fieldwork and data were collected through in-depth interviews from 10 interracial gay partners (comprising of 20 gay men). The study found that there is a growing formation of gay men's romantic relationships that transcend colour in post-apartheid South Africa, given the previous history of racial segregation and criminalisation of same-sex attractions as the ‘other’ in the country. The two common ways in which gay men who participated in this study form their household are through face-to-face and computer-mediated relationships.     

Realizing Civilization through Patrilineal Descent: The Intellectual Making of an African Racial Nationalism in Tanzania, 1920–501

The emergence of an African racial nationalism in Tanzania was as much an intellectual re-articulation of basic categories of identity as it was a response to the racial inequities of coastal East African society and European colonial rule. This article explores the intellectual agency of African thinkers who operated within structures of thought that understood civilization as something diffused from outside of Africa—either in the form of Swahili Islamic culture or the European civilizing mission. Writers and poets within Tanzania between the 1920s and 1940s came to assert an African racial identity by inverting the norms of Swahili society that valorized patrilineal descent from the Middle East. Instead, they argued that Africans can only become civilized and realize their nation/race by honouring male ancestors from inside the continent. In practice this meant that African writers demanded to exercise greater control over the sexual behaviour of African women, whose fidelity to racial purity, they alleged, was critical for Africans to realize civilization and political advancement. In the process of these debates, African writers working within the idiom of descent retooled the intellectual building blocks that would support the African nationalist movement in Tanzania during the 1950s and after.     

“微言”与“大义”：微信使用对乡村精英权威构建的影响——对大理白族村落的田野考察

数字时代背景下,乡村精英也在移动互联网的影响中经历着转化。文章以云南一个白族传统村落为研究个案,考察当地乡村精英群体的微信生活。研究发现,精英身份和意识赋予他们技术使用的独特性,微信对精英群体的权威建构发挥了新的影响和作用。具体来说,乡村精英通过对微信技术的积极运用,在巩固象征性资源、拓展社会关系网络、激发公共生活的参与度等方面形成了新的权威构建方式。文章试图从新媒体技术的角度去探究微信和乡村精英权威身份构建的方式以及技术带给村落社会的重要影响和意义。     

Risky business and geographies of refugee capitalism in the Somali migrant economy of Gauteng,South Africa

Research on migrant livelihoods in South Africa reveals links between social exclusion and migrant ‘cosmopolitan tactics’, including multi-sited socialities, diverse spatial business strategies and orientations precluding integration into a ‘xenophobic’ host society. Drawing on 10 months of ethnographic research, this study explores how Somali migrants’ business practices and tactics of mobility within and beyond Gauteng Province, South Africa (which encompasses Johannesburg and Pretoria) articulate with both broader transnational flows and investments in the local economy. Since the end of apartheid, Somalis and other migrants from the Horn of Africa have carved out an economic niche in peri-urban townships where high risk and frequent movement characterise workers’ lives. The Somali enclave in the neighbourhood of Mayfair, Johannesburg, links local and national circulations of people, goods and money to international circuits of the Somali ethnic economy—an economy that also involves non-Somali groups, mainly from Kenya and Ethiopia. These diverse dynamics of human mobility and financial circulation complicate bounded conceptualisations of transnationalism and also illustrate how tactical cosmopolitanisms may be grounded in spatial and social arrangements. The convergence of migrant mobility and financial flows produces distinctive patterns of livelihood embedded in a multi-scalar geography of movement, remittance, investment, risk and opportunity.     

Playing Away from Home: Identity in Northern Ireland and the Experience of Derry City Football Club

This article explores aspects of the history of Derry City Football Club in the period 1968-1985, and the effect that the Northern Irish troubles had on the soccer club. The whole question of identity within Northern Ireland has always been contested between those pursuing an Irish nationalist agenda, and those wishing to remain within the Union. This article locates Derry City within this struggle, and demonstrates how far reaching the effects of the contest between identities have been, even on something so 'normal' as a soccer club. Soccer clubs, it is argued, are an important location for the creation and sustaining of identities that are reflective of wider issues within society.     

Colonial Sainthood in Australasia

Concerned with the formation of national identities in postcolonial Australasia, this article compares and contrasts representations of religious women Mary MacKillop (1842–1909) and Suzanne Aubert (1835–1926). MacKillop, constructed as a contemporary popular ‘Australian legend’ is set to become Australasia's first saint, while in April 2004 investigation began into the beatification of New Zealand nun Aubert. Combining religious and secular explanations, despite the two women's lives and work displaying many similar characteristics, the article offers an explanation as to why it is that MacKillop, and not Aubert, will be Australasia's first saint. The article argues that representations of the two women are embedded in the construction of national identities in Australia and New Zealand that draw upon gendered ‘white settler society’ mythologies.     

政府管理体制改革视角下民族地区经济发展方式转变

我国民族地区的经济发展方式大多属粗放型,其转变的关键在政府管理体制改革。从民族地区政府管理面临的现实困境看,既面临特殊的社会历史自然环境,又要完成中央政府的经济增长考核目标和其他重点任务,还要应付民族地区复杂的群体性事件等。推动民族地区经济发展方式的转型,必须加快中央和民族地区政府职能的转变,正确处理政府与市场关系,完善对民族地区政府的绩效考核,创新民族地区政府管理体制,积极推动民族自治地区政府管理体制的改革步伐。     

‘They dug up wounds’: University of the Free State students’ experiences of transformation and integration in campus residences

This article seeks to illuminate the deeper and complex dimensions of post-apartheid transformation by examining how University of the Free State (UFS) undergraduate students experienced racial integration within campus residences. Data were drawn from a sample of 17 individual semi-structured in-depth narrative interviews with student participants. Three emergent themes (a) conceptualizing transformation, (b) racial diversity vs. relational unity, and (c) discourses of openness and possibility are presented. Drawing from the framework of Contact Theory, the article discusses how the three themes inform the nature of contact in post-conflict contexts and, specifically, UFS as an exemplar of a South African historically white university.     

Colonial legacies,post-colonial (in)securities,and gender(ed) representations in South Asia's nuclear policies

Through a comparative study of India and Pakistan's national security discourses, this article explores the linkages between post-colonial India and Pakistan's nationalist/communalist identities, configurations of masculinities, and gendered representations underpinning their nuclear (in)securities. This paper contends that the colonial politics of place-making in the sub-continent has not only inscribed a process of ‘othering’ between these states but has also facilitated the rise of divergent visions of post-colonial nationalisms, which, at each of their phases and with particular configurations of masculinities, have used women's bodies to re-map India-Pakistan's borders and national (in)securities. This article particularly draws attention to a new form of gendered manipulation in South Asian politics in the late 1990s, whereby both states, embedded in colonial notions of religious/cultural masculinities, have relied on discourses of Hindu/Indian and Muslim/Pakistani women's violence and protection from the ‘other’ to pursue aggressive policies of nuclearization. It is at this conjectural moment of a Hinduicized and Islamicized nationalism (flamed by the contestations of a Hindu versus an Islamic masculinity) that one needs to provide a feminist re-interpretation of India-Pakistan's nationalist identities, gendered imaginaries, and their re-articulation of national (in)securities – that represents a religious/gendered ‘otherness’ in South Asia's nuclear policies.     

奥巴马当选与美国文化取向

美国第一个非洲裔总统是在20世纪60年代以来白人主流文化社会控制力下降、出现"族裔认同"这一文化取向的背景下诞生的,是美国盎格鲁-撒克逊白人新教徒与非洲裔、其他各少数族裔长期融合的历史性成果。奥巴马当选是美国选民对"族裔认同"这一新的文化取向的认同,是对政府促进这一文化取向的"授权",将有助于美国构建"一个社会"与社会和谐。     

身份与利益——东南亚恐怖主义根源探析

恐怖主义是人类社会的灾难,长期对东南亚地区的和平与安全构成重大威胁。防控东南亚恐怖主义的蔓延并进行根治,是东南亚各国政府、域外利益攸关方(stakeholders)、国际组织共同关心的议题。身份-利益这一特质为区分东南亚恐怖主义类型提供了研究方法,也为探寻其不同的根源提供了研究途径。东南亚恐怖主义滋生于身份认同的异质化及自身对特殊政治利益的追求,以身份认同为标准和边界,东南亚恐怖主义可以分为左右翼革命型、民族主义-分裂主义型和宗教-政治型三种类型。东南亚恐怖主义身份认同需要靠利益支持,利益是东南亚恐怖主义身份认同的基础,没有利益支持的身份认同是不稳固的,当身份无法继续提供凝聚力时,东南亚恐怖组织将会走向解体或分裂,其中分裂出的恐怖组织分支会为寻求支持而建构新的身份认同。虽然东南亚恐怖组织存在多元身份认同,但只有其中一种身份在构建恐怖主义时起着决定性的作用。在治理恐怖主义上各国需要采取针对性强的政策,同时需要预防其他身份构建恐怖主义的可能。     

Multi-ethnic public sphere and accessible ethnic media: mapping online English-language ethnic media

The multi-ethnic public sphere requires a functioning media system that facilitates intercultural dialogue across communities. As producers of multi-ethnic voices, the role of ethnic media is important in this debate. However, studies so far have focused on ethnic media’s role within their respective communities rather than their role within broader society. Equally, theoretical debates on ethnic media as independent spheres focus on speaking by and listening to minority voices without consideration of the necessary conditions that need to be in place in order to enable these voices to be heard. This study advances Charles Husband’s notion of the ‘multi-ethnic public sphere’ by using a notion of an ‘intercultural media system’ that considers both availability and accessibility of ethnic media for a broader audience as a necessary condition to enable listening. Drawn from New America Media’s NAM National Ethnic Media Directory, the study provides a case study on the ethnic media sector in the U.S. by mapping accessible ethnic media, that is, ethnic media that produce content in English or bilingually online. The findings suggest the existence of a substantial base of accessible ethnic media with a growing interest in serving audiences beyond their respective communities.