Researchers in Arts

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Browsing by Subject "Apartheid"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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    �It�s just taking our souls back�: discourses of apartheid and race
    (Routledge, 2015) Bock, Zannie; Hunt, Sally
    Although apartheid officially ended in 1994, the issue of race as a primary identity marker has continued to permeate many aspects of private and public life in post-apartheid South Africa. This paper seeks to understand how youth at two South African tertiary institutions position themselves in relation to race and the apartheid past. Our data include four focus group interviews from two universities, one which can be described as historically �black� and the other as historically �white�. Given the complex nature of the data, we elected to use a combination of corpus linguistics and discourse analysis as our methodological approach. We explore how words such as black, white, coloured, they, we, us and them feature in the interviews. Our analysis shows that the positioning by the interviewees reflects a complexity and ambivalence that is at times contradictory although several broader discourse patterns can be distilled. In particular, we argue, that all groups employ a range of discursive strategies so as to resist being positioned in the historical positions of �victim� and �perpetrator�. Our paper reflects on these findings as well as what they offer us as we attempt to chart new discourses of the future.
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    Negotiating race and belonging in a post-apartheid South Africa: Bernadette�s stories
    (Kings College, Univ. of London, 2014) Bock, Zannie
    Although apartheid officially ended in 1994, race as a primary marker of identity has continued to permeate many aspects of private and public life in a post-apartheid South Africa. This paper explores how race is discursively constructed through narrative, particularly the quoted speech of others. It focuses on the stories told by a single participant, Bernadette, in a focus group at a South African tertiary institution and argues that despite the fact that she overtly rejects racist ways of thinking and talking, her talk is still structured according to the apartheid logic of racial difference and hierarchy. The analytical framework draws on Labov's seminal work on narrative structure and more recent work by De Fina, Bamberg & Georgakopoulou to explore how she uses narrative to perform her identity both in the interactional moment as well as in terms of the broader social discourses which constitute her context.
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    Transitivity and the narrator's role in selected TRC testimonies
    (Stellenbosch University, 2006) Bock, Zannie; Duncan, Paul
    This paper seeks to explore how two different narrators at a hearing of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) represent the same set of events. With the use of analytical concepts and frameworks drawn from Systemic Functional Linguistics, we show how the different narrators' roles and perspectives on the events shape their choice of genre and their construal of experience. The narrators in question are Mr Colin De Souza, a young activist from Bonteheuwel, and his mother, Mrs Dorothy De Souza. Both describe events in the 1980s when Mr De Souza and his family suffered at the hands of the then Security Branch of the South African Police Force.
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    �Why can�t race just be a normal thing?� Entangled discourses in the narratives of young South Africans
    (Kings College, Univ. of London, 2015) Bock, Zannie
    Although apartheid officially ended in 1994, race as a primary marker of identity hascontinued to permeate many aspects of private and public life post-apartheid. For young people growing up in the �new� South Africa, the terrain of racial positioning is difficult and uneven. Referred to as the �born frees�, they aspire to be liberated of the past yet are themselves shaped by and positioned within its legacy. While a number of scholars have explored the racial positioning of students in historically white institutions (or partly white in the case of the merged institutions), little research has been conducted on racialised discourses in institutions which can be described as historically black. This paper seeks to address this gap by reporting on the racial positioning in the discourses of students at the University of the Western Cape (UWC), South Africa. The data consist of six focus group interviews held on campus between 2009 and 2014. Working with Nuttall�s (2009) notion of �entanglement�, and using a focus on narrative, in particular �small stories� (cf. Bamberg &Georgakopoulou 2008), this paper explores how their stories provide insight into the complex and dialogic ways in which they discursively negotiate the racialised identities and discourses of both the past and the present and seek to imagine the future.