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Title Negotiating the '(Ab)normality' of (Anti-)Apartheid:Transnational Relations within a Dutch-South African Family
Full text http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02582473.2013.858763
Date 2013
Author(s) Henkes, Barbara
Abstract This article examines how the politics of Apartheid manifested themselves in networks that connected South Africa and the Netherlands. It analyses the transfer of narratives, images, ideas and political practices within a transnational kinship network, as well as through networks of political activists in both countries and worldwide. The footage a Dutch documentary maker shot during the 1980s, especially his focus on his well-established, 'white' relatives from South Africa and their encounters with 'black' compatriots, is used to trace these transnational dynamics. His material reveals the various narratives and markers of whiteness by which his relatives presented their privileged position in Apartheid South Africa as 'normal', while interviews with the filmmaker and some of his relatives in South Africa and the Netherlands some 25 years later give insights in how their performances were reshaped and received as 'abnormal' within the Dutch political context at the time. The post-apartheid memory work involved, show how the political and moral dilemmas are still felt to this day.
Subject(s) South Africa; the Netherlands; migration; kinship networks; 'stamverwantschap'; (anti-)Apartheid; African National Congress (ANC); transnationality; racial discourse; whiteness; memory work; film; performance
Language eng
Type of publication article
Source Henkes, B 2013, ' Negotiating the '(Ab)normality' of (Anti-)Apartheid: Transnational Relations within a Dutch-South African Family ' South African Historical Journal, vol 65, no. 4, pp. 526-554. , 10.1080/02582473.2013.858763
Repository Groningen - University of Groningen
Added to C-A: 2018-11-13;15:49:58