Re-Thinking Afrikaner Identity in the New South Africa

With the collapse of the apartheid state and the advent of black majority rule in 1994, the pillars that had previously sustained the system of colonial whiteness began to crumble. In such an unstable and shifting environment, white South Africans experienced a growing feeling of alienation and inner dislocation, which came coupled with the need to reassess their roots in the African continent. Especially for Afrikaners, who needed to face the shame associated with the crimes committed in the name of their culture, such a renegotiation required confronting an outrageous history of hegemony and oppression, as well as redefining the relationship between Self and Other. The book analyses the literary strategies deployed by writers to interrogate, deconstruct and re-articulate Afrikaner white identity in post-apartheid South Africa, by focusing particularly on the prose oeuvre of André Brink, Antjie Krog and Mark Behr. In examining texts which are marked by tangibly different stylistic traits, this work investigates the narrative structures and rhetorical devices through which the three authors engage critically with whiteness in the attempt to open new possibilities for dialogue and re-conceptualise Afrikaner identity in emancipatory ways.