*CFP* "WHITENESS IN THE POST-APARTHEID IMAGINARY", EDITED VOLUME

Whiteness – as an identity, a system of normativity, and a structure of power – stands out as one of the main foundations of the past three centuries of South African history. It has legitimised colonial and apartheid land dispossession, brutal forms of biopolitics, systemic injustice and the intergenerational reproduction of power and exclusion. South Africa’s racialised history has produced an economy that is one of the most unequal in the world and where white privilege is both material and symbolic. The histories of colonialism, apartheid and, arguably, the transition have produced a cultural architecture in which whiteness continues to function as a privileged way of both speaking and being heard. As the custodian of the normative in South African public discourse, whiteness is simultaneously invisible to many of its beneficiaries – many of whom now stubbornly insist on a post-race body politic – and hypervisible to those ongoingly excluded by its operations. 

The historical representations of whiteness in South Africa are marked by patterns of rupture and continuity; contestation and stasis. More recently, relations of sameness and difference are being renegotiated and new forms of identity, solidarity and agency are coming into view. At the same time, intersectionality allows us to rethink epistemologies of whiteness in terms of belonging, social justice and power. Whiteness in South Africa is also imbricated in transnational media cultures while being inextricably bound up with the particular racial discourses of the country’s past. Aiming to decentre whiteness by exposing its contemporary machinations and manifestations, this edited volume is interested in the modes of representation through which we come to ‘know’ whiteness in the local context of the post-apartheid moment.

We invite submissions for chapters for this edited volume that explore the different ways in which whiteness has been theorised, represented, contested and reimagined since the formal demise of apartheid in the early 1990s. The edited collection will be interdisciplinary and interrogate how South Africa’s past and present impact on  representations of whiteness. We invite chapters that explore representations or contestations of whiteness across a wide range of genres and cultural forms – including literature; art and photography; drama, musicology and the performing arts; documentary, film and television; advertising and journalism; political campaigning; and social media, as well as theoretical and philosophical reflections on post-apartheid whiteness.     

 

We welcome chapters that broadly address this topic and which may focus on, amongst other things:

• ‘reconciliation’ and the transition 
• post-transitional literatures 
• whiteness and the ‘post-race’ turn 
• critiques of whiteness as an analytical lens 
• political rhetoric 
• geographies of whiteness and spaces of exclusion 
• histories of whiteness in relation to liberalism and radicalism 
• whiteness in/and the environmental humanities 
• historical fiction and contemporary reflections on apartheid and colonialism 
• whiteness and the land question 
• whiteness, masculinity and class 
• whiteness and contemporary feminisms 
• queering whiteness studies 
• whiteness and the intersections of LGBTI politics 
• white identity politics 
• whiteness in education; and pedagogies of whiteness 
• intersectionality and power 
• genre and form 
• practices of reception 
• children’s literature and young adult fiction 
• decolonial perspectives on whiteness 
• whiteness as an ideological, theoretical and/or philosophical construct 
• affect and whiteness 
• race and biopolitics 
• comparative studies of apartheid and post-apartheid representations 
• contemporary re-readings of apartheid-era representations 
• transnational perspectives of whiteness 
• social justice movements, including #feesmustfall and #rhodesmustfall

We welcome submissions on the representations of whiteness in Afrikaans and African language literatures and cultural forms. However, all abstracts and chapters should be written in English. 

Authors should send an abstract of up to 300 words and a short biographical note to the editors of the volume at whiteness.submissions@gmail.com. Each of the contributions will undergo double-blind peer review processes. The accepted chapters will be included in the manuscript to be submitted to an academic publisher for consideration.

Deadline for submission of abstracts: 15 December 2018

Deadline for submission of full chapters: 1 June 2019

Length: 5500-7000 words (including endnotes and references)