White Women Writing White: Identity and Representation in (Post-) Apartheid Literatures of South Africa (review)

Adding to the growing number of studies in the field of whiteness studies, Mary West seeks to challenge “the continued effect of white normativity” that “hinders progress in healing the racial divide that is South Africa’s heritage” (3). Given the centrality of race in South Africa’s past and present–and, arguably, future–this study is timely, insightful, and necessary. West “examines the condition of whiteness as it continues to inform identity politics in South Africa” (3) by exploring the representation of whiteness as a cultural construct in contemporary white women’s writing across “four conventional genres” (6). She devotes a chapter to each of the following (in this order): the novel (People Like Ourselves, Pamela Jooste, 2004, and One Tongue Singing, by Susan Mann, 2005); the “‘novelistic’ autobiography” (6) (A Change of Tongue, by Antjie Krog, 2003); the “‘literary’ journalism” of women’s magazine columnist Marianne Thamm; poetry (Karen Press’s Echo Location: A Guide to Sea Point for Residents and Visitors, 1998); and short fiction by Nadine Gordimer (one story published in 1956 and two in 1991) and Marlene van Niekerk (2004).

Deploying feminist theories, West focuses on white women since they occupy “an uneasy space, falling somewhere between the phallogocentricity of Cartesian subjectivity and the iconographic other of western imperialism” (4). She selects particular authors by excluding those who no longer live in South Africa; by recognizing the heterogeneity of whites and thus including works (published in English) by both English-speaking and Afrikaans-speaking women; by incorporating “mainstream” writers like Krog as well as “neglected or marginal voices” (5); and, lastly, by embracing multiple genres. Her aim is to demonstrate the ways in which white women’s writing in postapartheid South Africa is “uncomfortably both consciously in support of, and unconsciously at odds with, multicultural celebrations of rainbow nationhood”; this “uneasy duality,” marked as it is by the sense of entitlement, “undoes [. . .] the very project of ‘reconciling’ races” (3). Rather than the “narcissistic navel-gazing” of a self-identified white, middle-class, middle-aged South African, West justifies her examination of “manifestations of whiteness [as an] an opportunity to confront the universal epistemological power of whiteness” (22).

In the new political dispensation, West argues, whites in general feel no necessity to negotiate their whiteness except as guilt and defensiveness. Whites’ writing, especially that by women, is characterized by a “heightened sense of insecurity” (13) that nonetheless mask a continuity with apartheid’s racial hierarchies. The ordering of the chapters “plots a continuum” of the writers’ increasing awareness of “whiteness as a cultural construct and of their own positionality in relation to the discursive dynamics that inform South African racial politics” (3). Whereas, at one extreme, Jooste’s novel “unintentionally” reproduces discourses that reinforce the legitimacy of “matronly whiteness,” at the other extreme, van Niekerk “employs layers of self-ironisation to comment on and acknowledge her own complicity in the discourses that promote and sustain racial hierarchies.” The remaining writers fall “somewhere in between these diametrically opposed positions” (36). The point, she assures us, is not “to level charges of racism” (16) but to pay attention to the ways in which the tendency “to claim whiteness as a beleaguered alterity in fairly insulated white suburban communities” (18) is manifested. West concludes that genre is the single most important factor in determining the identity politics of each text: the most popular form, the “pulp fictional” (194) novel, is most likely to rehash “grand narratives that reinforce white hegemony” (191), while the least popular genres, namely, poetry and short fiction, “offer the most scope for a concentrated engagement with the politics of representation” (190).

Written with clarity and conviction, West’s White Women Writing White asks many important questions and is likely to provoke much needed debate among literary scholars. While one might argue that her ranking of texts is not always effectively...