University of Venda Discourses on Difference and Oppression

Reluctant Blackness and ‘a whole new loneliness’ in Rayda Jacobs’ The Middle Children: A Womanist Critique

Pumla Dineo Gqola How, one is tempted to ask, do people who live in communities inhabit, spookily and precariously, a rim of inbetween reality? […] Surely relegation to such a space relies on an essentialist view which posits a ‘pure’ reality that is experienced in the space inhabited by the racially pure.

Race talk is dirty business. This is the case primarily because race discourse exists in a racist context, a context that is occasioned by such desire to deny what it is that its mode of operation is to play on ambiguities of the human condition in order to avoid getting to the heart of the matter.

Rayda Jacobs’ introduction to South African reading audiences was through laudatory media reviews of her second novel, The Slave Book. These identified her explorations of South African slave subjectivities as groundbreaking. Indeed, the highly researched project successfully places repressed material on slavery as worthy of discussion and interpretation identifying new ways of reading his past through its focus on sites of slave resistance. Those few scholars whose response has been more careful, however, maintain that while the novel opens up slavery for creative signification, the language of characterisation adopted by Jacobs in refusing to be self-reflexive partially re-inscribes colonialist tropes implicated in the objectifications of the body of the Other. They argue that the narrative is defined by an anxiety which contradictorily also allows for the simultaneous conservative recital of Black (slave) subjectivity. Less attention has been paid by South African scholars to Jacobs’ other two texts, The Middle Children and Eyes of the Sky. In this paper, I argue that The Middle Children is propitious for an examination of the locality of Black heterogeneity in South Africa as presented in the author’s work. In the partly autobiographical collection, Jacobs, focuses on an ambiguous site within Blackness which she labels one of ‘middleness’. It is a position which signifies ambiguously in Jacobs’ first published text referring both a specific Black location and resistant to associations with Blackness as a racial marker. An examination of Jacobs’ work necessitates a reappraisal of the critical languages through which womanist and postcolonial scholars access meanings in Black artistic cultural production. As a starting point, therefore, I turn to interrogate the discourse through which I am to approach Jacobs’ writing.

It comes as no surprise that apartheid language continues to determine the manner in which we speak against its discursive construction of Black identities since ‘[p]olitics do not stand in polar opposition to our lives. Whether we desire it or not, they permeate our existence, insinuating themselves into the most private spaces’. That centrality of language to apartheid control further muddles the names we use to define ourselves. The Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) in South Africa responded shrewdly to this challenge and reclaimed the label ‘Black’ from its racist circumscription, thus freeing it of its oppressive possibilities. It emphasised self-liberation and secured a Black identity we can inhabit revolutionarily. Furthermore, it exposed self-definition and unity as liberatory tools for Blacks in the struggle against apartheid. However, Blackness and Black unity were often translated in ways which rehearsed inequalities present in a white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. Discussions of racism and Blackness were ‘usually predicated on the experiences of black men’ and the stress on unity yielded a homogeneous reading of Blackness. Consequently, discussions of heterogeneity within Black experience were deferred considerably. Rayda Jacobs’ writing contributes creatively to this discussion which leads to an increased visibility of Black historical experience. This developing prominence itself engenders the exploration further unconventional areas of inquiry. In her work she explores Blackness from a position gendered female. However, because apartheid demarcated Black people into divergent races and assigned names to fix these boundaries, it is difficult to begin to talk about the specificities of these spaces in a language not heavily invested with apartheid currency. Renaming is crucial to ‘a radical intervention [during which] we develop revolutionary attitudes about race and representation.’ Indeed as bell hooks argues, ‘to do this we must be willing to think critically about images. We must be willing to take risks.’ Womanist literary criticism is informed by the connections between ‘theoretical praxis, literary form and political struggle’ where we ‘recognise the necessity for a multipronged approach to resistance struggle (personal, political and cultural) which, in fact, can only work if one acknowledges the multiplicity of "black" experience’. The demand for an approach which centres on Black subjects has been felt beyond womanist locations and its constitution is contested terrain. Different ways of inhabiting Blackness confound opportunities to open up this space for positive signification. For instance, Jomo Kwadi insists that,

Black people should construct this epistemology. This response is very problematic because there are all kinds of ‘Black people’, for example, ‘Blue eyed Black’ people who negate the very existence of the Black self. The task of developing a Black epistemology belongs to Black people who do not negate the existence of the existential experiences of Black people. Kwadi is plagued by anxieties over who can ‘authentically’ speak as Black. The cloak of ambiguity articulated in his invitation introduces a problematic he does not resolve. The composition of those ‘Blue eyed’ Black people, who are denied Blackness is not explained. He echoes an unease present in early BC thought on the position of Blacks seen to uncritically mimic white ideals of beauty, by for instance wearing blue contact lenses. These Blacks, interpreted as lacking ‘authenticity’ are expendable and remain for Kwadi excluded/able from Black experience. Even if theoretically, as articulated in early BC, those Black people who deliberately approximate whiteness ‘have not yet’ attained psychological liberation, they inhabit a space that is racialised Black. As Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye suggests, the yearning for whiteness can be an integral part of liberating the Black psyche or in more familiar terms ‘decolonising the mind’. Additionally, in our construction of epistemologies which allow for fuller expressions of our subjectivities, we need to guard against inscribing binaries where we imagine that the manner in which Black people (choose to) inhabit our bodies can be read to reveal our political locations. There is a further and perhaps less deliberate quandary in Kwadi’s charge: a vagueness regarding the position of Blacks naturally endowed with blue eyes. Furthermore, some Black intellectuals are expected to take on the role of policing the production of this epistemology. These intellectuals are then deemed more ‘authentically’ Black than others. Kwadi’s fissures complicate our reading of Jacobs’ writings. Jacobs’ Somiela in The Slave Book, the slave character of mixed race parentage has green eyes. Under Kwadi’s definition, she is excludable from an articulation of Black identity even as she is a slave and therefore necessarily Black. Her experiential positioning is excluded from contributing to Kwadi’s Black epistemology. Thus it is crucial that we remain attentive to the mechanisms of identity constitution as dynamic. Stuart Hall cautions, [i]nstead of thinking about identity as an already accomplished fact, which the new cultural practices then seek to represent, we should think, instead, of identity as a ‘production’, which is never complete, always in process, and always constituted within, not outside, representation. Inasmuch as womanist scholarship is informed by ‘the interaction of Afrocentric, multicultural, and feminist theoretical interpretations of political, economic, historical, social and cultural’ moments, processes of naming remain convoluted for South Africans. For purposes of expediency, I find Zimitri Erasmus’ terminology useful here and in this essay ‘coloured-african’ and ‘black’ will be used to refer to two of the three ‘groups’ which define Black South Africanness, the third being Indian. I am mindful that all positions are political and often consciously socially constructed and I am resisting here a labelling which implies talking about Black South Africans of ‘mixed-race’ on one side and ‘racially pure’ parentage on the other. In a democratic South Africa naming is not static and reclamation and redefinition present new possibilities as evidenced by the shifting contemporary uses of ‘c/Coloured’. Here I am in agreement with Zoë Wicomb’s postulation that, [s]uch adoption of different names at various historical junctures shows perhaps the difficulty which the term ‘coloured’ has in taking on fixed meaning, and as such exemplifies postmodernity in its shifting allegiances, its duplicitous play between the written capitalisation and speech that denies or atleast does not reveal the act of renaming – once again the silent inscription of shame. In her writing Rayda Jacobs encodes race within conflicting tropes. She energetically critiques whiteness in the novels Eyes of the Sky and The Slave Book where ‘[w]hiteness, like blackness, is neither pure nor monolithic. It must be seen as a racialised identity, if only in terms of the advantage that being white brings to it’. However, through these same novels and her short stories in The Middle Children she registers some locations within Blackness in terms of racial ‘purity’. The Middle Children further provokes unpacking the meanings of racial ‘middleness’. This devious signifier will be unburdened to reveal its constitution and enigmatic deployment in Jacobs’ narrative.

Rayda Jacobs’ three texts focus on the possibilities presented by the ‘coloured-african’ body for historic transgression, where ambiguity is means of access to the transgressive moment. For Jacobs’ project, the focal point is the Black body that approximates whiteness and is then able for differing lengths of time to occupy spaces designated specifically for white bodies. The stories published as The Middle Children pay more detailed attention to these possibilities and theorise this position in proximity with apartheid (not slavery and colonialism like the later two).

These partly autobiographical stories trace the life of Sabah Solomon from the moment she is caught ‘playing white’ having secured a white card and lived partly as white for several years. The CID offers her a ‘choice’ between exile in Canada or jail in South Africa. The final story sees her voting in the first democratic elections and preparing herself for permanent return. The stories inbetween offer flashbacks to a girl Sabah taunted as a child for appearing white. Jacobs reveals ‘middleness’ from various vantage points where Sabah’s story is told so that, ‘the narrator and the multiplicity of subject positions adopted by the protagonist do not cohere into a unified ‘I’. The protagonist is a non-unified composite of a variety of subject positions adopted by the subject of the autobiography.’

In the title and opening story to the volume ‘middleness’ is defined racially as ‘[n]ot white, not black, but the offspring of many races: the neurotic middlechild of a dysfunctional womb.’(13) This description echoes an earlier one used in the 1904 Cape Colony census which named three ‘clearly defined race groups in this colony: White, Bantu and Coloured’ where ‘Coloured’ was defined as ‘all intermediate shades between the first two’. Jacobs’ labelling of ‘coloured-africans’ as ‘middle’ validates the colonialist and later apartheid definition. This remains true even when Sabah later refuses to be called ‘Coloured’ or ‘Cape Malay’ insisting instead on an identity as simply ‘Muslim’ since she cannot but take offence at those labels about which she announces, ‘I don’t like those words. That's their words for us.’(141). ‘Middle’ and ‘Muslim’ are offered as alternatives to the official apartheid labels even if ‘middleness’ signals similarly to these same labels. This function is particularly obvious in ‘For the Smell of the Sea’ where Sabah defends herself against claims that exile is an easy escape from the daily indignity of apartheid. The resulting exchange emphasises the location of racial ‘middleness’ as a space located between whiteness and ‘blackness’, with the latter occupying fixed positions. Sabah calls for a theorisation of the position of ‘middleness’ neglected in a national tendency to speak of ‘black’ oppression. She maintains,

Pain in pain. For anyone who has suffered under this regime. It's not about who suffered the most. We have our own demons to work on, don't think we don't. The middle people have had it better than the black people, yes, but the middle people have suffered too. [...] At least, if you have a black skin, you know you're black. The devil isn't at your elbow telling you to just get into the white section of the train 'cause there you'll have a seat, or leave out your race on the job ap because you're so damn qualified and want the job. Whiteskins are tempted everyday into falseness and deceit. What's that a result of? [...] We've all been fucked by apartheid.'(143) [Emphasis added] The above passage reveals various disharmony in the invention of racial ‘middleness’ in Rayda Jacobs’ short stories. First, ‘middle people’ are disenfranchised during apartheid and therefore Black. Since they are seen as having ‘had it better than the black people’ in the Western Cape, they are recognisably ‘coloured-african’. The equation of ‘coloured-african’ to ‘middle’, disintegrates when Sabah centres ‘whiteskins’ in this location since not all ‘coloured-africans’ can be mistaken for white. The focus shifts from general race oppression of all Black people to a specific experiential location of light-skinned Blacks. Furthermore, she rejects a location within Blackness in favour of one between white and b/Black culminating in her decision to actively ‘play white’. The ‘middle’ position is infused with subversive potential by virtue of this middleness, a mode of resistance alien to those endowed with indisputable Black corporeality given that ‘[t]he devil isn’t at [their] elbow.’(143) Here ‘middleness’ is produced via a shameful rejection of b/Black alliance as signalled by a loathing ‘kaffir hair [because it flags] bushman [sic] beginnings.’(138); or engagements broken off because ‘mommy said that the girl's too black, the children might have kroes hair.’(138) Jacobs’ project oscillates between these two definitions of ‘middleness’ the subject of which are ‘coloured-africans’ but (frequently) demands ‘whiteskin’ as sole entry to racial ‘middleness’.

It is important that ‘whiteskin’ be central to a definition of ‘middleness’ if Jacobs’ project is to successfully focus on the experiences of ‘playing white’. However, the text maintains a somewhat tenuous distinction between ‘playing white’ and a longing to be white. For instance, Sabah reveals the urge to become somebody else and live effectively as a white person thus:

When I was sixteen and I wanted to go to business school and got a white card. I thought you could change your identity and escape who you were. Just change the C to a W and get a new life. I got a new life all right. And a new country. And a whole new loneliness. (158) [Emphasis added] The desire to ‘escape’ is coupled with a defiant impulse to access resources situated outside the reach of Black South Africans during apartheid. The ‘whiteskinned’ Black body is constantly assaulted because of its gesticulation to whiteness by sources within and outside Blackness: My trouble with the law may have started with that card, but the resentment started when I was in diapers. I had the audacity to come out white. White is right. White gets you everything. It got me a phone call to the C.I.D. from someone in the family. Can hatred go deeper? (159) The resentment experienced by ‘whiteskin’ Blacks is constitutive of their experiential positioning. It results from the ‘audacity’ to approximate whiteness invested as that identity is with privilege and freedom. It becomes a reminder of the basic humanity what most Blacks were denied in apartheid society because ‘[w]hite gets you everything’ whilst ‘[t]he blacks signal the extreme category of the non-whites’ and thus powerlessness. Consequently ‘middleness’ becomes a privileged position within Black identity both coveted and resented. These contradictory responses are exposed in ‘Borders’ when sibling rivalry is revealed to be influenced by colourism: Her colour I could understand. My mother's father was white, you know, and my parents weren't unattractive people, there was straight hair in the family. But no one looked like her, so fine featured and fair. [...] Christmas was the worst time because all the aunties came, and it didn’t matter how my hair was ribboned or rolled, how I shone in my tafetta, she could come in with her dress hanging by a thread, I would becomes as important as wallpaper. She’d get the biggest doll, the best books, more cream on her strawberries than Rose and me. It took years to figure out why I always started the new year depressed. (48) Thus ‘whiteskin’ is at once valued because of its approximation to the ideal of beauty held up in white supremacist patriarchal society and invested with much pain. Fair skin is circumscribed by entitlement and perceived as free from the anxiety of working towards the attainment of this white female ideal. Only the darker skinned sister need care for her hair, clothes and behaviour to elicit acknowledgement. Fair skin surpasses all these machinations of the body as the sister infused with ‘whiteskin’ can ‘come in with her dress hanging by a thread’ and still be valued. The dilemmas of this subject positioning permeate the way in which ‘whiteskins’ inhabit their homes and communities. Sabah chooses to m/‘Masquerade’ when home is not sanctuary but abusive: ‘She didn't feel safe in this house with seven boys calling her "white bread" in front of her friends’. (25) She responds to the injury furiously and as a girl once ‘broke [another] girl’s arm’ out of anger because ‘the girl called her whitey’.(131). These coping mechanisms for being read as white when not actively ‘playing white’ are refashioned by the adult Sabah. This is particularly clear in ‘Make the Chicken Run’ where she encounters a Jamaican couple who refuses to work with her in Canada on the assumption that Sabah is a white South African. Sabah’s response is telling, ‘It was a slap in the face, being rebuffed for something I wasn’t guilty of, the irony of it; yet I felt bolstered that she’d taken a stand.’ (162)

Even if Sabah often aspires to whiteness and actively ‘plays white’, however, this activity cannot be dismissed as falling outside Black subversive experience. Indeed, the ambiguous Black body undermines white supremacist capitalist patriarchal ‘knowledge’ since,

[s]ystems of racial oppression depend upon the notion that one can distinguish between the empowered and disempowered populations. […] Yet the bodies of mixed-race [sic] characters defy the binaries upon which constructions of racial identity depend. […] The light-skinned black body thus both invokes and transgresses the boundaries between the races and the sexes that structure social hierarchy. The ability to resemble whiteness is always potentially subversive. Erasmus suggests that sensitive Black scholarship needs to embrace a more creative engagement with the (self)-representation of Black bodies which approximate whiteness since this cannot automatically be read only as an aspiration towards whiteness and thus a rejection of Blackness, but a cultural activity which is responding to oppression and dispossession creatively. Similarly Homi Bhabha maintains that ‘strategies of hybridity, deformation, masking and inversion’ in their application have the subversive potential to demonstrate that forces of social authority and subversion or subalternity may emerge in displaced, even decentred strategies of signification. This does not prevent these positions from being effective in a political sense, although it does suggest that positions of authority may themselves be part of a process of ambivalent identification. Indeed the exercise of power may be both politically effective and psychically affective because the discursive liminality though which it is signified may provide greater scope for strategic manoeuvre and negotiation.[Emphasis in original] Bhabha’s conjecture holds here for there are moments where Sabah feigns whiteness and yet undermines it in the minds of her companions by consciously using language associated with ‘coloured-african’ situations. For her ‘playing white’ becomes transgressive behaviour and can be read as a form of ‘Masquerade’, hence the renaming of her as such by her grandfather when, as a child, she constantly ‘passes’ for a boy in her refusal to engage in behaviour deemed appropriate for Black girls. Similarly, while in Canada she acquires two parrots which she names Hendrik and Pik and teaches them to chant ‘Sorry, Sabah, Sorry Sabah’ and ‘Amandla! Amandla!’ respectively. (161)

While there needs to be a recognition of the potential subversion contained in the decision to ‘play white’, it is equally clear that Sabah rejects any identification with Black people whether they be ‘black’ or dark skinned ‘coloured-african’. Ultimately, the position of ‘middleness’ is embraced both for the manner in which it offers white privilege and the high value which it receives given that, ‘[i]n black communities, there is a long history of power and superiority being invested in children’ who are light-skinned. The celebration of the ‘middle’ body then where it refers to ‘whiteskin’ is conservative in Jacobs’ work because in its refusal to identify with Blackness, it contains the desire to not only be read as white, but also the desire to be white not just in terms of the possibility of the privileges which accompany whiteness. Additionally, it does not question apartheid structures, but uses their loopholes. It rejects Blackness, especially in Jacobs’ writing, by objectifying clearly Black bodies because ‘[t]he blacks signal the extreme category of non-whiteness’. It is thus not a transgressive Blackness, but a reluctant one which is embraced here, a denial and rejection of all reminders of this Blackness. It is interesting that when Sabah is mistaken for a white South African and therefore rejected by the Jamaican woman, she is willing to initially say that she is not white, but not what she is. Nor is she willing to defend herself beyond the initial reluctant denial of whiteness. In other occasions she defines herself as ‘non-white’ and specifically ‘middle’ and that legitimises the position of whiteness as characterised by power. It leaves unquestioned the binaries which perpetuate apartheid. Additionally, at the end of Jacobs’ narrative, Sabah announces, in ‘Make the Chicken Run’, that, ‘Apartheid’s like heart disease. We’re all casualties, we all have our goggas in the dark, our prejudices. It’s going to take an understanding of the disease to reverse the damage.’ (162). Because the ‘we’ refers to all South Africans, all ‘prejudices’ present in the South African political landscape are conflated here whether they be intra-racial prejudices (colourism) or racism. It is this in part, the adoption of ‘middleness’, or ‘precisely the celebration of inbetweenness that serves conservatism’ which uncover Bhabha’s theories of hybridity as subversion and which is able to ‘provide greater scope for strategic manoeuvre and negotiation’ as inadequate in current Black South African politics.

The definition of ‘middle’ itself is contaminated by a non-recognition of Blackness choosing instead to celebrates the validity of the power dynamics which accompany the position of whiteness. This ‘middleness’ can be seen as contesting the conceptual territory of political definitions of Blackness because it refuses to invest these with coherence or to be implicated in the cohesion of their anti-racist cohesive junctures.

1. Zoë Wicomb, ‘Shame and Identity: The Case of the Coloured in South Africa’, in Writing South Africa: Literature, Apartheid, Democracy, 1980-1995, edited by Derek Attridge and Rosemary Jolly (Cambridge University press, 1998b).
2. L. R. Gordon, ‘Critical “Mixed Race”?’, Social Identities, 1.2, 1995, pp. 161-173.
3. See, for example, Jen Crocker, ‘A Look into the Metaphorical Fire’, Cape Times, 22 January 1999; Tim Trengrove Jones, ‘From the Outside Looking Back at the Present’, Sunday Times, 25 April 1999; Robert Plummer, ‘Fascinating and Unexplored Slice of Our History’, The Sunday Independent, 7 March 1999; and Joan Hambidge, ‘Roman Gee ‘n Stem aan doe Geskiedenis se Stilgemaaktes’, Rapport, 6 December 1998.
4. AC Fick, ‘Abysmal Fissures: Problems of Address and redress within the literature of slavery in South Africa’ Paper presented at the Association of University English Teachers of South Africa (AUETSA), Bloemfontein, 26-29 March 2000; and Pumla Dineo Gqola ‘She’s Handsome for a Slave: Configurations of Racial Hierarchy and Sexuality in Rayda Jacobs’ The Slave Book’, in Reading Slaves’ Bodies: Representations of Memory and Slave Subjectivity in Selected late Twentieth Century Literature, Unpublished MA Dissertation, University of Warwick, 1999.
5. The Middle Children (Toronto: Second Story, 1994); Eyes of the Sky (Cape Town: Kwela, 1996); The Slave Book (Cape Town: Kwela, 1998).
6. Angela Y. Davis, ‘Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired: The Politics of Black Women’s Health’, Women, Culture, and Politics (London: Women’s Press, 1990), p. 53.
7. bell hooks, ‘Introduction: Revolutionary Attitude’, Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End, 1992), p. 7. Ibid, p. 7
8. Fawzia Afzal-Khan, ‘Bridging the Gap Between So-Called Postcolonial and Minority Women of Colour: A Comparative Methodology for Third World Feminist Literary Criticism’, Womanist Theory and Research: A Journal of Womanist and Feminist-of-Colour Scholarship and Art, 2.1, 1996, pp. 35-47, (p35 and 40)
9. Jomo Kwadi, ‘What Black People Haven’t Done Yet’, Black Experience, 1996, np.
10. See Zimitri Erasmus, ‘Undoing the Locks: the Politics of Black Hair/Styles in South Africa’, in Sarah Nuttal and Cheryl-Ann Michaels, eds, Creolisation (Cape Town, Oxford University Press, Forthcoming); Homi Bhabha, ‘Dissemination: Time, Narrative and the Margins of the Modern Nation’, The Location of Culture (London & New York: Routledge, 1994); Gordon, 1995; Sisi Maqagi, ‘Who Theorises?’, Current Writing, 2, 1990, pp. 22-25.
11. Stuart Hall, ‘Cultural Identity and Diaspora’, in Padmini Mongia, ed, Contemporary Postcolonial Theory: A Reader (London & New York: Arnold, 1996), p. 110
12. Cheryl Rodriguez, ‘Anthropology and Womanist Theory: Claiming the Discourse of Gender, Race and Culture’, Womanist Theory and Research: A Journal of Womanist and Feminist-of-Colour Scholarship and Art, 2.1, 1996, pp. 3-11, (4)
13. See, for example, Yvette Abrahams, ‘Two Master Narratives and Nowhere to Go: The Semantics of Colouredness’, Inter Action 6: Proceedings of the Sixth Postgraduate Conference, edited by Herman Wittenberg, Gabeba Baderoon and Yolanda Steenkamp (Bellville: University of the Western Cape Press, 1998), Pumla Dineo Gqola, ‘What’s in this Womanist Shit? Naming Self as Resistance’, Unpublished paper presented at the African Womanist Workshop, January 1998, University of Cape Town, Rondebosch; and Erasmus, Forthcoming.
14. I am well aware that these labels are not without problems but use them here strategically. I choose not to use ‘Brown’ since the political connotations of that label in South Africa are problematic and predominantly conservative. I retain the quotation marks around ‘black’ and do not use ‘African’ as a differentiator because of a refusal to theorise an Africanness which does not always include ‘colouredness’. Similarly ‘whiteskin’ and ‘playing white’ are not without problematic ideological baggage. I retain their usage here as the signifiers used in the text to refer to fair skinned Blacks and the activity some of them engage in when they pretend to be white.
15. Wicomb, 1998b, pp. 93-4
16. Marie Helen Laforest, ‘Black Cultures in Difference’, in Iaian Chambers and Lydia Curti, eds, The Post-colonial Question: Common Skies, Divided Horisons (London & New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 118
17. Judith Lütge Coullie, ‘ “Not Quite Fiction”: The Challenges of Poststructuralism to the Reading of Contemporary South African Autobiography’, Current Writing, 3.1, 1991, pp. 1-23, (p. 3)
18. I. Gouldin, ‘Coloured Identity and Coloured Politics in the Western Cape of South Africa’, in L. Vail, ed, The Creation of Tribalism in Southern Africa (London: James Currey, 1989)
19. This is explicitly presented in ‘Make the Chicken Run’ among other places.
Gordon, 1995, p. 388
20. Valerie Smith, ‘Class and Gender Narratives of Passing’, Not Just Race, Not Just Class (New York & London: Routledge, 1998), p. 40
21. Erasmus, Forthcoming
22. Bhabha, 1994, p.145.
23. Gordon, 1995, 387
24. Gordon, 1995, 388.
25. Wicomb, 1998b, p. 102-3.

References

Abrahams, Yvette, ‘Two Master Narratives and Nowhere to Go: The Semantics of Colouredness’, in Herman Wittenberg, Gabeba Baderoon and Yolanda Steenkamp, eds, Inter Action 6: Proceedings of the Sixth Annual Postgraduate Conference (Bellville: University of the Western Cape Press, 1998)

Bhabha, Homi, ‘Dissemination: Time, Narrative and the Margins of the Modern Nation’, The Location of Culture (London & New York: Routledge, 1994)

Carby, Hazel, ‘Quicksands and Representation: Rethinking Black Cultural Politics’, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987)

Coullie, Judith Lütge, ‘“Not Quite Fiction’: The Challenges of Poststruralim to the Reading of Contemporary South African Autobiography’, Current Writing, 3.1, 1991, pp. 1-23.

Crocker, Jen, ‘A Look into the Metaphorical Fire’, Cape Times, 22 January 1999.

Erasmus, Zimitri, ‘Undoing the Locks: the Politics of Black Hair/Styles in South Africa’, in Sarah Nuttal and Cheryl-Ann Michaels, eds, Creolisation (Cape Town: Oxford University Press, Forthcoming)

Fanon, Frantz, ‘The Fact of Blackness’, in J. Donald and A. Rattansi, eds, ‘Race’, Culture and Difference (London: Sage, 1992)

Fick, A C, ‘Abysmal Fissures: Problems of Address and Redress within the Literature of Slavery in South Africa’, Paper presented at the Association of University English Teachers of South Africa (AUETSA), March 2000, University of the Free State, Bloemfontein.

Goldin, I, ‘Coloured Identity and Coloured Politics in the Western Cape of South Africa’, in L. Vail, ed, The Creation of Tribalism in Southern Africa (London: James Currey, 1989)

Gordon, L. R, ‘Critical “Mixed Race”?’, Social Identities, 1.2, 1995, pp. 161-173

Gqola, Pumla Dineo, ‘“She’s Handsome for a Slave”: Configurations of Racial Hierarchy and Sexuality in Rayda Jacobs’ The Slave Book, ’ in ‘Reading Slave Bodies: Memory and Representation of Slave Subjectivity in Selected Late Twentieth Century Literature’, Unpublished MA Dissertation, University of Warwick, 1999.

---, ‘What’s in this Womanist Shit? Naming Self as Resistance’, Paper presented at the African Womanist Workshop, January 1998, University of Cape Town, Rondebosch.

Hall, Stuart, ‘Cultural Identity and Diaspora’, in Padmini Mongia, ed, Contemporary Postcolonial Theory: A Reader (London & New York: Arnold, 1996)

hooks, bell, ‘Introduction: Revolutionary Attitude’, Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End, 1992)

Jacobs, Rayda, Eyes of the Sky (Cape Town: Kwela, 1996)

---, The Middle Children (Toronto: Second Story Press, 1994)

---, The Slave Book (Cape Town: Kwela, 1998)

Kwadi, Jomo, ‘What Black People Haven’t Done Yet’, Black Experience, 2, 1996, np.

Laforest, Marie Helene, ‘Black Cultures in Difference’, in Iaian Chambers and Lidia Curti, eds, The Post-colonial Question: Common Skies, Divided Horizons (London & New York: Routledge, 1996)

Maqagi, Sisi, ‘Who Theorises?’, Current Writing, 2, 1990, pp. 22-25

Smith, Valerie, Not Just Race, Not Just Class (New York & London: Routledge, 1998)

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, ‘Criticism and the Institution’, Sarah Harasym, ed, The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies and Dialogues (New York & London: Routledge, 1990)

White, Hayden, ‘Historicism, History and the Figurative Imagination’, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Discourse (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1978)

Wicomb, Zoë, ‘Five Afrikaner Texts and the Rehabilitation of Whiteness’, Social Identities, 4.3, 1998a, pp. 363-383

---, ‘Shame and Identity: The Case of the Coloured in South Africa’, in Derek Attridge and Rosemary Jolly, eds, Writing South Africa: Literature, Apartheid and Democracy

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