Browsing by Author "Gartushka, Itai"

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    Discourse of whiteness in post-apartheid South Africa, as reflected in letters to the editor in the Cape Argus and Cape Times
    (2009) Gartushka, Itai; Jubber, Ken
    South Africa's post-apartheid era of democracy has required whites to renegotiate their identities within a new dispensation; a task whites have responded to in ways ranging from deep acceptance to strong resistance. For whites who resist the new dispensation, the aim is to find ways of maintaining white privilege despite the end of apartheid. Based on this contention, the present study investigated how discourses of whiteness were justified and normalised in post-apartheid public discourse - namely in letters to the editor. Letters to the editor, printed during 2007 in two daily Cape newspapers - the Cape Argus and the Cape Times - were categorised into themes with the aid of NVivo. Two themes that dealt with issues of post-apartheid transformation were selected for detailed analysis using discourse analysis. The first theme explored resistance to street renaming in Cape Town and the second theme explored resistance to transformation in Springbok rugby within the context of the 2007 Rugby World Cup. An additional, pervasive theme which included white negativity towards Africa, and notions of white victimisation in the new dispensation, was also briefly explored. The analysis revealed the robustness of discursive attempts to block transformation within sites chosen for transformation. Moreover, it revealed how such discursive attempts were framed in ways that naturalised and normalised whiteness within the context of the new dispensation. These findings are congruent with a general view of whiteness as a shifting, flexible construct, and confirm the need to continuously investigate the changing discursive strategies employed to maintain whiteness in post-apartheid South Africa.
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    Texts in black and white: co-constructing racialised identities in post-apartheid South Africa
    (University of Cape Town, 2020) Gartushka, Itai; Foster, Don
    This thesis poses the following question: are post-apartheid racialised identities constructed relationally? More specifically, this thesis investigates the co-construction of black and white racialised identities within the realm of South African public discourse. To this aim, it draws on editorials and letters to the editor which appeared in the City Press and the Sunday Times newspapers from 1994 to 2011. Informed by Foucauldian Discourse Analysis, the analysis focuses on the relationality between blackness and whiteness through a consideration of two major discourses. These discourses, labelled Bold New Blackness and Enduring Whiteness, are presented as templates for post-apartheid racialised identity construction. The analysis is comprised of three interrelated parts. The first part demonstrates that the respective templates construct racialised identities in terms of oppositional views regarding the apartheid past and the emerging post-apartheid future. Nevertheless, as each template contains references to the racialised other, it is suggested that racialised identity is co-constructed independently within each template. The second part shows that the way in which blacks and whites are positioned is constructed through constant reference across the two oppositional templates. In turn, it is suggested that racialised identity is co-constructed interdependently between the templates via an endless cycle of opposition. The third part delves into black and white subjectivities, revealing that the templates are neither wholly independent nor wholly interdependent. Instead, it is suggested that racialised identity is co-constructed through a set of entanglements, disentanglements and re-entanglements between blackness and whiteness. In this way, the thesis elucidates the post-apartheid tensions and complexities that exist around black and white racialised identity co-construction. Moreover, given that the vast majority of existing studies have presented black and white racialised identities as independent constructions to be examined separately within the respective fields of blackness and whiteness studies, this thesis highlights the fruitfulness of simultaneously utilising these otherwise disparate fields of study.