Hugo Canham

Being black, middle class and the object of two gazes

The growth of the black 1 middle class in ‘post-apartheid’ 2 South Africa has become the subject of scholarly and public interest. Applying elements of discourse analysis to interview and group discussion based data, this article provides a qualitative thematic exploration of two pressures that confront a group of black middle-class professionals residing in Johannesburg, South Africa. The first pressure is the experience of being black under the hegemonic white gaze and the second is the experience of the marshalling black gaze. The complexities of occupying the positions of being black and middle class and of living with the scrutiny of two gazes concurrently, is explored. The findings suggest that the white gaze persists in seeking to negatively mark and destabilise black professionals and profiting off covert and paradoxical mobilisations of race discourses as a means of bolstering whiteness. On the other hand, the black gaze serves to police the boundaries of what acceptable blackness is. Under this gaze, the professional, black middle class is perceived as having sold out to whiteness and abandoned given conceptions of blackness. The tensions arising out of navigating these dialectical disciplining gazes suggests that this group holds the tenuous position of being corralled from the ‘outside’ and ‘inside.’ The research, however, reveals the complex ways in which racialisation continues to shape black lives alongside the less rigid identity possibilities for blackness that move beyond essentialised identity performances.

Outsiders within: non-conformity among four contemporary black female managers in South Africa

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to foreground non-conformity in organisational life as it relates to black female managers. My intervention here is to problematise organisational theory in relation to its limited ability to engage with affect and to point to a more generative framework. Through centering the body, the author also seeks to offer a counter narrative to the field of Positive Organisation Scholarship and its drive to primarily engage with happy feelings and harmony. Design/methodology/approach – The author gives a close reading of four black womens interview-based narratives to engage with the ways in which they refuse to conform to organisational scripts of happiness. The author makes a case for using both critical discourse-based and affective readings of everyday experience which social science readings cannot readily account for. Findings – Non-conformity has a number of local effects including negotiating the present from a position of alternative histories of struggle and cultur...

Transnational perspectives on Black subjectivity

In this article, five Black researchers bring their insights into conversation about meanings of blackness in contemporary Australia, Jamaica, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America. We critically interrogate blackness transnationally and also within the historical contexts of our work and lived experiences. Situated within critical race studies, we draw on multiple theoretical frameworks that seek to preserve the complexity of blackness, its meanings and implications. We examine what it means to be made Black by history and context and explore the im/possibilities of transcending such subjectification. In so doing, we engage blackness and its relationality to whiteness; the historical, temporal, and spatial dimensions of what it means to be Black; the embodied, affective and psychical components of Black subjectivity; and the continued marketisation of blackness today. The article concludes by reflecting on the emancipatory promise of continued engagement with Black subjectivity, but with critical reflexivity, so as to avoid the pitfalls of engaging blackness as a static and essentialised mode of subjectivity.

Epistemological resistance towards diversality: teaching community psychology as a decolonial project

In contexts of political instability and change, the value of disciplinary knowledges and the processes that constituted them is often questioned. Psychology is not exempt from this process. Little South African work has illustrated what teaching for decoloniality may mean in South African psychology. We draw on examples of curriculum design in community psychology from the Universities of the Witwatersrand, South Africa and Stellenbosch, three large South African public universities, in an attempt to surface what we regard as the decolonial frameworks that underpin their development and delivery. Capacities for reflexivity and the ability to hold multiple epistemologies encourage economies of knowledge that may prevent abyssal thinking, while contributing to cognitive justice and minimising opportunities for epistemicide. Some challenges to our pedagogy involve the potential for romanticising decoloniality.

Living through the legacy : the Apartheid Archive Project and the possibilities for psychosocial transformation

The Apartheid Archive Project is an ongoing, collaborative research project that focuses on the collection of personal stories and narrative accounts from ordinary South Africans about their experiences of racism during apartheid. The primary aim of this initiative is to provide a forum for differing sectors of South African society to share and reflect on their past experiences, in the hope that these will offer us an array of alternative entry points into the past, in addition to the accounts of historians and other scholars. Crucially, the project aspires not merely to record these accounts—in itself an important act of remembering different histories—but also to engage thoughtfully and theoretically with them. In these ways, the Apartheid Archive Project encourages both a commitment to personal and collective remembering, and a joint intellectual and political commitment to interrogating stories and narratives rather than simply accepting them at face value. An intellectual and political cornerstone of the project is to contribute to a form of critical psychosocial mnemonics. Critical psychosocial mnemonics is interested in engaging with those mechanisms and processes that facilitate individual and collective remembering; how these memories intersect with lived experiences and various histories; what they can temporally reveal about the past, the present and an imagined future; how they reflect and/or construct the psychological and social subject, intersubjectivity and intergroup relations; and how they may allow us to make critical, analytic commentaries about the social world and its psychological inscription.

Interrogatory Destabilisation and an Insurgent Politics for Peacebuilding: The Case of the Apartheid Archive Project

Employing the lens of radical peacebuilding, this chapter revisits the histories and contemporary manifestations of race and racism more than 20 years after the transition to a fully enfranchised and democratic political system in South Africa. Framed within the broader Apartheid Archive Project, which examines the nature of the experiences of racism of ordinary South Africans under the old apartheid order, and their continuing effects on individual and group functioning in contemporary South Africa, the chapter explores the ways in which archives, memory, stories and narratives may illuminate the challenges and possibilities for peacebuilding in a racialised society. It argues that archival sites offer us the possibility for a critical engagement with the past and the present through forms of interrogatory destabilisation—a process of persistent and deconstructive critique of status quos in countries that have transitioned from authoritarianism to post-authoritarianism. In addition, it suggests that such a deconstructive approach to archives may inform an insurgent form of citizenship and politics that is necessary for radical peacebuilding in societies that remain structurally violent and socially unequal.

EMBODIED BLACK RAGE

Examining two sets of archived materials that include a corpus of narratives that reflect on the period of apartheid in South Africa and posters used by anti-apartheid activists, the paper teases out the operations of racism and the manifestations of rage on the Black body. Critical discourse analysis and affect as theory and method are applied to trace the work of racism and its affective consequences and resistances. Here affect is deployed to read the terrain of the corporeal and the discursive. Black rage is seen as a response to White supremacy and it has the following outcomes: it can have destructive consequences, can enable psychological release of pent up anger, and can simultaneously be an expression of self-love.

Theorising community rage for decolonial action

Rage is under-theorised in South Africa. This absence is more pronounced in psychological scholarship. This is a remarkable oversight since we have gained infamy as the world’s epicentre of protest action. In this article, I read the landscape of scholarly production to conduct an analysis of how community rage and protests are made sense of. The analysis focuses on work from the past decade as it has been reported that this period has witnessed the greatest intensity of protest action within the post-apartheid period. I contend that protests are a form of community rage at sedimented oppressions. I demonstrate that the expression of community rage provides us the opportunity to work towards our collective decolonisation. In this analysis, I offer that affective meaning making in the theorisation of rage can craft a scholarship that enables praxis towards decolonial action.

Women bankers in black and white: exploring raced, classed and gendered coalitions

ABSTRACT Black women constitute the majority of the population but they lag significantly behind white women and other groups in their participation in the labour market. Intersectionality requires that we recognise the differences in experience between black women and white women. This is not for the purposes of what some have called the “oppression Olympics” but to research the stratifications of social asymmetries in a manner that allows for an understanding of the complexity of inequality. Based on interview data and observations, we use employment equity discourses to explore the differential positions of black women and white women managers in a major bank’s headquarters in Johannesburg, South Africa. A historical analysis of black women and white women’s experience illustrates the systemic and institutional aspects of intersectionality as well as the difficulties in forming coalitions between black women and white women. In the final analysis we argue that the mutual advancement of women requires historicisation and renewed commitment to partnerships to eradicate sexism and racism.

Are we getting socially just pedagogy right? Reflections from social work praxis

ABSTRACT This article explores how the teaching of group work field education can be developed through learning communities. The Bachelor of Social Work degree is being revised to include a wider social development focus against the backdrop of increasing socio-economic inequality. Given these changes, educators are encouraged to develop courses that promote active learning to engage students emotionally, cognitively and behaviourally as socially responsible citizens. Socially just pedagogy, informed by a convergent theoretical orientation that is able to hold multiple realities, forms of inequality, and agency, was used to underpin the field education course to achieve learning outcomes of critical thinking, reflection, reflexivity and an acute understanding of difference. In this exploratory qualitative study, the views of eight students and five external field supervisors are considered in relation to the introduction of the Ke Moja (I am fine, without drugs) programme to conduct group work at working class public schools. The focus was to foster greater awareness on substance use implementing a meso-practice group work intervention. Data were from a focus group with students and a semi-structured interviews with external field education supervisors. Data were analysed using thematic analysis. Findings of the study suggest the potential of the programme to strengthen social work students’ awareness of the critical aspects of group work, the values and the ethics relevant to the profession and thoughtful citizenship. They also point to the limitations of the programme to engage with the socio-economic conditions that produce drug dependence.