White talk : white South Africans and the strategic management of diasporic whiteness

Bibliography: leaves 286-321.This dissertation examines resistant whiteness in the context of post-apartheid South Africa. Situating white South Africans as part of the powerful racial dispersal of Europe formed as a result of colonial expansion, it argues that since democracy, which has placed white South Africans in a weak position to the immediate centres of state power, white South Africans are constructing typically diasporic dimensions to the way in which they operate. Utilizing insights from the Discourse Theory of Laclau and Mouffe, and based on four studies which range across a period of a decade and incorporate large samples of different forms of publicly available everyday discourse, the thesis traces the pervasive and resilient discursive formation that it calls white talk: a resistant and flexible set of ideologically-charged discursive strategies which attempt to perpetuate privilege into the new dispensation while paying careful attention to self-presentation. While the dynamics for English and Afrikaans-speaking white South Africans are not identical, the manipulative power of white talk is shown to depend on its ability to leverage the intersections within the social space that whites in South Africa occupy. This space incorporates elements of whiteness, the powerfully centred social positionality, and diaspora, which is usually theorized as a marginalized and weak positionality. The dissertation confirms the importance of understanding whiteness in both its global and local dimensions, and of recognizing how these interact and bolster each other to perpetuate seemingly innocent, but in fact reactive, sites in which racial advantage is normalized