ryan irwin on the place of south africa in transnational conceptualisations of the ‘colour line’
Abstract
This study examines scholarship about the global color-line. It unfolds in two sections. The first traces how understandings of race and racism were encoded within university environments in the mid-twentieth century. The second shows how this epistemology influenced early academic comparisons of the United States and South Africa in the 1980s and why the literature diversified in the post-apartheid era.
My effort here is fairly focused. Rather than examine the infinitely large body of work on transnational discrimination and resistance, this study looks tightly at a singular topic: scholarship on South Africa’s place in the world. The conceptual lodestar of work on global racism, South Africa – and the apartheid question more specifically – has guided a particular research agenda for nearly half a century, pushing historians in different fields toward a similar set of inquiries, assumptions, and intellectual imperatives. The result has not only been a uniquely specific map of South Africa’s ‘proper’ place abroad, but also a surprisingly unified vision of what racism is, where it came from, and how it transformed world history in the twentieth century. This map remains influential in our modern era, attaching meaning to international resolutions and weight to public discourse, even as the reference points that gave it life erode slowly in the face of the ‘New’ South Africa and the ‘post-Cold War’ world. Decoding the scholarship on South Africa in the world – uncovering its fault lines and support beams and how it evolved – offers an excellent pathway for better understanding the origins, complexities, and contradictions of the color-line narrative.
We are in a unique moment of intellectual upheaval. The reference points and narratives that largely shaped scholarly understandings of human interaction through most of the twentieth century have buckled in recent decades – questioned, subverted, and reformulated by academics and laypeople alike, all eager to adjust staid explanations of the political present and historical past. This tumult has transformed the historical discipline in palpable and ethereal ways. Regardless of subfield, historians are being asked today to rethink categories of nationalism, culture, and territoriality, and reconsider how such frameworks helped institutionalize assumptions that made the messiness and interconnectivity of the past less discernable to those tasked with its preservation. The nation, once treated as an omnipotent organizing principle of historical inquiry, has emerged from this milieu on the defensive, pursued by cosmopolitans who, although respectful of its power, are eagerly shining light on the crevices, connections, and contradictions of the global past.
This historiographical study looks at the effects of these upheavals from a particular vantage point. It explicates the epistemological evolution and the imaginative geography of a transnational narrative both bigger and less discrete than the nation: the story of the color-line. Open nearly any textbook today and W. E. B. Du Bois’s famous dictum that ‘the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line’ invariably frames and animates discussions of racial discrimination and nonwhite activism. What was this color-line and how have historians studied it? It has been treated, more often than not, as a metaphor for those left behind and excluded in the nation’s unyielding march toward modernity – the line of conflict where nonwhites fought back against the linearity of the European mind and the discriminatory blind spots of national development. Like any other narrative, this story has developed its own self-referential terminologies and updated itself with time, and provided historians with essential guideposts to understand world affairs.
A compelling and thorough lit. review/discussion piece, this.
Filed under: Southern Africa, United States | Closed
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