Summary
Instead of denying history and fabricating a totalising colouredness, ‘multiple belongings’ can be seen as an alternative way of viewing a culture where participation in a number of coloured micro-communities whose interests conflict and overlap could become a rehearsal of cultural life in the larger South African community where we learn to perform the same kind of negotiations in terms of identity within a lived culture characterised by difference.
ZOE WICOMB ‘Shame and identity: the case of the coloured in South Africa’, 1998… the meaning and significance of whiteness (and blackness) within a given polity at a given time [matters] … why… take the dominant [meaning] to be definitive …
MICHAEL J. MONAHAN The Creolizing Subject: Race, Reason, and the Politics of Purity, 2011MY BLACKNESS IS SUPPOSEDLY visible only because I do not ‘look white’. But, in some parts of West Africa I am called white. My blackness is ambiguous because I am not black Black or black African. These descriptions are increasingly used to distinguish between formerly colonised South Africans with different historical relationships to this region and its colonial past. I am (more often than not) not considered African in South Africa. I am still called ‘Coloured’. In the Western and Eastern Cape provinces ‘what I am’, racially speaking, is seldom questioned. In Limpopo, Gauteng and Mpumalanga, the northern provinces of the country, I am asked which tribe and which country I am from. In parts of Europe I am assumed to be from a Caribbean island. African-Americans are surprised to find that I was born and live ‘in Africa’. People from different parts of the world ask ‘what mix’ I am. Which would you prefer? Salt and vinegar or cinnamon and sugar? Neither one of my parents was black Black. Neither one of them was white White.3 I am not half-and-half.
FAMILY STORIES
The anthropologist Tim Ingold borrows the term ‘meshworks’ from Henri Lefebvre to refer to reticulate lines of journey, not ‘networks’ or lines of ‘getting-there’ that connect points as destinations (Ingold 2007: 81–84, 2012: 206).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Race OtherwiseForging a New Humanism for South Africa, pp. 1 - 28Publisher: Wits University PressPrint publication year: 2017