Garth Stevens

Academic representations of ‘race’ and racism in psychology: Knowledge production, historical context and dialectics in transitional South Africa

Abstract The paper critically reviews thematic patterns and trends pertaining to constructions of ‘race’ and racism within South African psychologys formal discourse between 1990 and 2000. It notes that clear differences emerge temporally with shifts in the socio-historical terrain of South African society, and it is the authors contention that these manifestations relate directly to ideological, political, social and economic conditions prevalent in South Africa and within the global context. Political transformation and its associated perceived threats to economic, social and cultural integrity; the impact of globalization and neo-liberal ideologies; and the contested institutional dynamics underpinning ‘race’ and racism in postapartheid South Africa are all explored as potential factors contributing to these academic discourses within South African psychology. The study is a thematic analysis of the South African Journal of Psychology during this period and highlights the shifting ontological, epistemological and methodological frameworks as they relate to the study of ‘race’ and racism. Furthermore, it provides us with the basis to examine how academia dialectically engages with ideological contestations pervading the social fabric and mirrors material and historical shifts in the political and socio-economic landscapes of South Africa. The paper argues for a revisiting of critical understandings of ‘race’ and racism within the framework of modernity, a re-commitment to historical and materialist deconstructions of ‘race’ and racism and cautions against the potential contradictions within postmodernist understandings of these social scientific phenomena. However, it simultaneously acknowledges the changing social and economic relations upon which modernist theorizing has been premised and suggests a theoretical re-calibration that allows for the interface between the benefits of critical theory and postmodernism in order to begin to reflexively understand manifestations of ‘race’ and racism in the new global context.

Trends and redress in community psychology during 10 years of democracy (1994-2003) : a journal-based perspective

Drawing on a content analysis of selected articles from the South African Journal of Psychology (SAJP) and Psychology in Society (PINS), the authors reflect on the extent to which South African community psychologys early vision resonates in publications in post-1994 South African psychology. Concerned about the Euro-American, patriarchal, classist, and individualised orientation in clinical, counselling, and social psychology, community psychologys vision arose as a response to this crisis of ‘relevance’ in the 1980s in South Africa. It placed the accent on accessible psychosocial services, re-defining the roles of psychologists, democratising psychological practice, prevention, competencies, empowerment of under-represented groups, collaboration, and inclusive modes of knowledge production. Our content analysis suggests that South African community psychology tends to operate within a porous disciplinary boundary, sharing academic concerns with a larger group of critical psychologists. Authorship characteristics show that for the 1994 to 2003 period male and females were more or less equally represented as authors, the majority of whom were affiliated to academic institutions. In contrast, co-authorship as an expression of collaboration did not feature strongly and the community voice was unrepresented at authorship level. Most of the articles tended to assume an empirical or theoretical slant and examined themes consistent with community psychologys early vision and focus. Similarly, research in community psychology seemed to have attended to selected priority psychosocial issues and drawn on historically neglected groups, including black adolescents and adults, to serve as participants. By way of conclusion, we surmise that community psychology, albeit an under-represented branch of psychology, may be one of many areas of engagement for those aligned to the quest for emancipatory psychological practice and theory in South Africa.

The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission: ‘Race’, historical compromise and transitional democracy

Abstract The article examines the manner in which the imperatives of national unity and reconciliation in South Africa have been pursued at the expense of economic, social and psychological reparation to the majority of South Africans. Notably, the elision of land reform and socio-economic issues in the negotiation of a transition from apartheid to a non-racial democracy has resulted in the maintenance of an economic system promoting a “de-racialised insider and a persistently black outsider” (Bundy, 2000). The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), with its restrictive focus only on gross human rights violations from 1960 onwards, contributed towards this process by facilitating a sophisticated amnesia of the greater historical and structural violence of apartheid. Moreover, its use of a hybrid process of testimony based on eliciting personal and juridical “truth” to construct its official history, rendered the project of forging a collective memory and identity impossible. Rather, the racialized divides salient during apartheid were taken up, maintained and rewritten in other discourses which performed essentially the same function, that being to maintain a passivity towards addressing exploitative social and economic conditions. Finally, by choosing to focus on trauma narrative and testimony, the TRC utilized the disturbing surplus of unsymbolized trauma experience as the raw material from which to sculpt the official discourses it required to create the New South Africa. A Lacanian-based discourse analysis of survivors’ testimonies suggests that, at the subjective level, the telling of trauma at the TRC hearings may have constituted a second-order trauma.

‘Racialised’ Discourses: Understanding Perceptions of Threat in Post-Apartheid South Africa

Since 1993 there have been increasing reports of ‘racial’ tensions within South Africas black populace. Blacks labelled as ‘coloured’ appear to be expressing increased perceptions of ‘racial’ threat in relation to blacks labelled as ‘African’. As discourse is one of the mechanisms through which racist ideology is reproduced, this study examined the ‘racialised’ discourses of seven black adults (i.e. ‘coloureds’) from a Western Cape community. The study, which was conducted in 1995, explored how participants spoke about ‘other’ blacks (i.e. ‘Africans’) and whether representations of ‘racial’ threat were evident within these discourses. Discourse analysis was employed within a hermeneutic framework when interpreting the functions and social significance of the discourses. The discursive themes reflected perceived threat of the ‘other’, but appeared to function defensively for participants, who fear marginalisation in post-apartheid South Africa. The findings emphasise the need for addressing racism at broader social levels, rather than through problematising specific social groups. Introduction

Men in Africa: Masculinities, Materiality and Meaning

Address correspondence to Tamara Shefer, Private Bag X17, Bellville, 7535, South Africa; email: tshefer@uwc.ac.zaal. At a public lecture in Cape Town earlier this year, Professor Sandra Harding, an internationally renowned feminist author, spoke to the question ‘Can men be subjects of feminist thought?’ (1 March 2010, District Six Museum, Cape Town). In her talk, Harding called on men to elaborate critically on their subjective experiences and practices of being boys and men – from childhood to adulthood, and through fatherhood to old age. She argued that while androcentric thinking has dominated knowledge production globally, men’s self-reflexive voices on their own experiences of being boys and men have been relatively silent, particularly through a profeminist and critical gender lens. Harding thus drew attention to an important challenge confronting contemporary psychology, a challenge that underpins the rationale for this Special Edition of the Journal of Psychology in Africa. However, much of our knowledge within the discipline of psychology has been and remains uncritically based on boys’ and men’s experiences and perspectives. More specifically, as Boonzaier and Shefer (2007) argue, most psychological knowledge is not only predominantly based on research with men, but also in most cases, middle-class, white, American men. Studies that problematise and foreground masculinity itself, that challenge masculinity as normative, and that apply a critical, gendered lens, are still relatively marginal in the social sciences and particularly in psychology. This is however beginning to change.

Tactical reversal or re-centring whiteness? A response to Green, Sonn, and Matsebula

Green, Sonn, and Matsebula (2007) offer critical whiteness studies as a potential form of resistance against the strategic relations of power that constitute racism. While there may be utility in applying and extending international work on whiteness in the South African and Australian contexts, it is important to observe some cautions. First, whiteness manifests differently across contexts, and the type of comparison performed by Green et al. may at times elide important differences between, for example, contexts where whiteness has historically always been on the defensive versus contexts where it has not. Second, whiteness studies runs the risk of uncritically accepting white identity self-articulations. Third, whiteness studies may be incorrectly perceived as a ‘silver bullet’ for understanding and combating racism, rather than as a complementary and often secondary critical tool for anti-racist praxis.

Through her Eyes: Relational References in Black Women's Narratives of Apartheid Racism

We explore the relational nature of race and racism as manifested in womens narratives within the Apartheid Archive Project—a compendium of narratives related to quotidian apartheid experiences generated by “ordinary” people. We argue that apartheid was not only a system of interconnected social, political and economic structures that oppressed, but that it required those who lived under it to enforce it in supremely intimate ways. It is from within this context that this article explores the relational nature of apartheid narratives by black women, with an emphasis on polysemy, or the possibility that the narratives may have multiple meanings and functions. We found that their stories reflected a diverse range of social positioning, with discursive themes drawing on both hegemonic and subordinated discourses of race and gender, and reflecting the nature of black womens social locations within South African society in both the past and the present. Discursive themes illustrating black womens silences, solidarity, voice and mastery are highlighted in the article. Utilising elements of critical discourse analysis within a qualitative framework, this article makes provisional commentaries about the intersection of race and gender during apartheid, and in post-apartheid South Africa, and attempts to highlight the need for an ongoing critical engagement with racialised and gendered subjectivities as historical and contemporary social phenomena.

Textual transformations of subjectivity in men's talk of gender-based violence

This study examined how men accounted for their violent behaviours against their intimate female partners. In-depth qualitative interviews were conducted with 12 men from three men’s groups in Johannesburg, South Africa. All the men self-reported that they had committed acts of intimate partner violence previously, and the majority were from low-income, township settings. Dissociations, justifications and confessions featured as the predominant accounting forms that worked to transform participants’ subject positions from the ‘violent abuser’ to the ‘legitimately violent partner’ and even to the ‘changed man’. Attention is accorded to how gender ideologies and heteropatriarchal discourses legitimating male violence against women were reinforced, yet were at times challenged within their talk and through rhetorical devices. In line with a poststructuralist reading, the study highlights the complexities underpinning men’s varied meanings of violence. On the one hand, it reveals the agentic shifting of identities. On the other, it highlights the social discourses that are embedded in men’s talk and therefore inscribed into male subjectivities.

Decolonisation, Critical Methodologies and Why Stories Matter

The Apartheid Archive Project seeks to expand the archive by inserting everyday stories into the public record, thereby allowing for the reconstruction of historical memory, voicing silenced stories and recognising experiences of excluded communities. Stevens, Duncan and Sonn (in this volume) note that personal memories are the primary raw data within the Apartheid Archive Project at present, and that narratives are a key means for conveying stories about racism during the apartheid era (see Mankoskwi & Rappaport, 1995, for a further explication of the distinction between stories and narratives).

Promoting Methodological Pluralism, Theoretical Diversity and Interdisciplinarity Through a Multi-Leveled Violence Prevention Initiative in South Africa

SUMMARY Violence prevention within low-income, under-resourced communities presents significant challenges to community development researcher-practitioners seeking to maximize partnerships, resource utilization and overall program effectiveness. This article highlights a South African research and service delivery organizations efforts to develop a violence prevention matrix, premised upon an adaptation of the public health approach and the infusion of a critical, community development praxis. It presents preliminary outcomes of a multi-level pilot application of this matrix in a low-income neighborhood in South Africa, specifically focusing on evaluating its capacity to foster methodological pluralism, theoretical diversity and interdisciplinarity, together with promoting community empowerment and coalition-building strategies.