Recognition Through Pleasure,Recognition Through Violence: Gendered Coloured Subjectivities in South Africa

Abstract

In apartheid South Africa those classified `Coloured' occupied a socio-political position characterized by both racial exclusion from full citizenship and selected inclusion as partial subjects. This ambiguous relation to the polity partly shaped discomfort with the place of `the coloured' on the part of both the apartheid state and resistance movements. In the post-apartheid era this discomfort continues. More specifically, voting preferences among the majority of those historically classified coloured in both the 1994 and 1999 elections have triggered interesting contestations about these identities. Unfortunately, debates in this regard tend to be stuck around notions of coloured identities as either non-existent, or white-identified relics of apartheid, or as rooted in essentialist tribal mythologies. This article explores alternative possibilities for understanding and articulating coloured identities. By analysing an extract from the life history of one woman it traces the narrator's recognition of herself as coloured through her experience of white racism. In addition, reflections on the research encounter reveal such recognition, on the part of both narrator and researcher, through the pleasures of the research process. This work illustrates the centrality of white racism to the formation of the narrator's identity as coloured, challenging simplistic accusations that coloured people are white-identified. It further illustrates a subjective and richly textured reality to constructions of these identities.