Futures Past of South African Whiteness in Nadine Gordimer’s Writing 1959-1979

Abstract

This project examines the position of the white subject in Africa. Specifically, it examines Nadine Gordimer’s exploration of the notion of whiteness and white Africanity in her fiction and prose, as well as her investigation of the oppressor’s consciousness, and her negotiation and interrogation of her own position as a white South African. In essays and speeches she intervened in debates and voiced feelings and apprehensions that concerned the futurity of whiteness in a shifting political and social context. As I argue, these interventions were made from a new emerging subject position that resulted from the social and political constraints of apartheid and colonialism, inhabiting the interstice of an old, given colonial order, and the decolonial processes of the antiracist, anti-imperial and anticolonial struggles in Africa and Europe which was bringing the colonial era to an end. Through her fiction writing she was able to shape this subject position, which lacked representation and hence existence within the dominant political discourse. Projected into her fiction, the subject position emerges as an object of knowledge within the intellectual history of South Africa.

Keywords

Colonial/postcolonial, Racialisation/Racism/"race", Social exclusion/inclusion, Landscapes, Decolonial thinking

Publications

Julia Willén (2018) “Vithet vs vithet”. Glänta , no. 1.

Julia Willén, Andrew van der Vlies (2018) “Reading for hope: A conversation about texts and method”. Safundi, Vol. 19 , pp. 357-373.

Julia Willén (2017) “Past futures lost: people power of the south as utopian concurrence”, in: Contested histories from el Complejo , pp. 85-96.

Julia Willén and Stefan Jonsson (2017) “Writing history for an uncertain future: concluding remarks Austere histories in European societies”, In: Austere Histories in European Societies: Social Exclusion and the Contest of Colonial Memories, eds. Stefan Jonsson and Julia Willén. London: Routledge, 182-194.

Julia Willén and Stefan Jonsson (2017) “Writing history for an uncertain future: concluding remarks Austere histories in European societies”, In: Austere Histories in European Societies: Social Exclusion and the Contest of Colonial Memories, eds. Stefan Jonsson and Julia Willén. London: Routledge, 182-194.

Stefan Jonsson and Julia Willén (2017) “Introducing austere histories”. In: Austere Histories in European Societies: Social Exclusion and the Contest of Colonial Memories, eds. Stefan Jonsson and Julia Willén. London: Routledge, 1–18.