Christi Kruger at the Wits City Institute

WiSER PhD student Christi Kruger will present a paper at the first seminar for this term organised by the Wits City Institute, Friday, 22 July, 13:00-14:00, Wits Anthropology Museum.

(Dis)empowered whiteness: un-whitely spaces and the production of the good white home

Christi Kruger

This paper draws on ethnographic fieldwork in a white informal settlement in South Africa, to explore the ways in which poorer whites with perceived notions of whiteness and blackness negotiate living in informal settlements. In doing this, I argue, they deliberately identify as informal settlers, or squatters, while consciously displaying normative forms of whiteness. It is specifically through the organisation of their informal houses and homes that white informal settlers seek to construct a whiteness which mimics that subscribed to by poorer Afrikaners in the 1930s. In this way, they differentiate their living space from that of other — black African — informal settlers in South Africa while not completely abandoning the idea that they, too, are informal settlers. I argue that white informal settlers negotiate these different social identities by constructing the concept of a whitely squatter camp and are thus able to negotiate perceived contradictory identities.   Christi Kruger is a doctoral fellow at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research, completing a thesis in anthropology. Her current research is focussed on a white informal settlement on the West Rand of South Africa. It explores the socio-economic genealogies of the poorer white residents who have settled in this settlement, their everyday practices of making livelihoods, and attempts to reproduce ideologies of South African whiteness in this space. Her research interests are in the areas of critical whiteness studies, post-apartheid political economies, and systems of state assistance.    

For queries and RSVP: Patricia Hadebe patricia.hadebe@wits.ac.za