Blanc de Blanc: Whiteness Studies - A South African Connection?

Proposing a version of whiteness studies for South Africa, this article lays some of the groundwork for a research project that is yet to be comprehensively tackled. Over the past 30 or so years in progressive scholarship in and about South Africa, whiteness has become so deligitimised by virtue of its complicity with apartheid that it has often been rendered "blank", a taken-for-granted negative essence, a place less looked-into and a site of assumed uniformity. The essay suggests that if one were to reopen the category of South African whiteness and begin to de-essentialise it, in all likelihood what one might call the "difference within" would both contradict assumptions of uniformity and prove interesting. The article summarises and analyses trends in whiteness studies in the US and suggests ways in which such a project might be differently tackled for South African purposes.