Realizing the Rainbow Nation: Negotiating Race, Intimacy, and Belonging in South Africa

Abstract

This dissertation examines how racial categories, boundaries, and identities were constructed and reproduced through the fierce regulation of sexuality and intimacy over the longue durée of the colonial encounter in South Africa. However, it also examines the racialized and eroticized politics of social integration regarding people’s private and intimate lives in post-apartheid society and visual culture. This dissertation project develops from extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Stellenbosch and Cape Town, archival research, semi-structured interviews, and digital media analysis research, conducted over sixteen months between 2012 and 2020. Interracial relationships remain relatively rare, and they continue to be stigmatized in many social spaces. However, such stigmatized relationships are gradually becoming more common—and much more visible—in post-apartheid public culture. I argue that the heightened visibility of interracial relationships and mixed-race families in the emerging “mediascapes” of global society, functions at once as a measure and mechanism of integration. Changing regimes of racial representation are generating vociferous public debates about sexuality and intimacy, and it is through the dialectics of public discourse that settler colonial worldviews and moral imaginaries of race are reproduced and entrenched, but also challenged and reimagined. Gradually, mixed relationships, families, and identities are emerging from colonial narratives of tragedy and shame. Increasingly people who are emotionally invested in intimate relationships across colonial boundaries are being represented as Mandela and Tutu’s “visible legacy”—as living icons of integration, symbolizing the transformational power of love, the promise of reconciliation, the possibilities of living with difference, and the long-deferred dream of building a multiracial South African nation in the ruins of apartheid.