Giving back the land: whiteness and belonging in contemporary South Africa

Abstract

While previous research has unpicked the forced coincidence of racial and spatial relations, including through critical examinations of the role of environmentalist discourse in the reproduction of racial hierarchies, a careful analysis of the current South African conjuncture, with its combination of persistent racial inequality and growing political momentum behind radical land redistribution, has yet to be conducted. This dissertation approaches this task as a question of deconstructing the hegemonic relations between whiteness as a power structure, and “the land” as a material and symbolic resource. Arguing for a broader discursive interpretation, or ‘thick’ sense, of what is meant by “the land”, hegemonic land relations are analysed through a framework built both upon the repairs to Western Marxism elaborated by poststructuralist critics of Althusser and Gramsci, and on the radical critiques of colonialism and whiteness found in the work of Frantz Fanon, Steve Biko, and Sara Ahmed. Analysis is presented of four sets of articulations: the radical Black critique of the white relationship with the land, the conservative defence of whiteness as under siege by vengeful ‘Blacks’, the ‘whitely’ campaign against rhino poaching, and group conversations between white environmentalists intent on halting natural gas extraction through hydraulic fracturing in the Karoo. All four discursive formations rely on a “common-sense” notion of the inevitability and inviolability of white property and power, and the continued relevance of liberal notions of efficient land use and property ownership in the Lockean tradition, which contribute to the perpetuation of racial division in South Africa. A “structural topology” (Marttila, 2016, p. 134) of the discourse reveals the relevance of affect, racial actor fictions and narratives, notions of fairness and responsibility, and how specific institutions and subject roles materialise the discourses that entrench hegemonic whiteness.