The many faces of the middle class: African teachers' politics in South Africa, 1940-1990

Scholarly inquiry and debate over the course of the past century has produced a number of conflicting theoretical positions as to the "political mission" of the middle class, each with important implications for contemporary political practice. And yet there is little agreement over the definition of this class or its political role in society. This dissertation examines the question of the political nature of the middle class through a case study of the politics of African teachers and their organizations in twentieth-century South Africa. In this dissertation I argue that existing theories of the middle class tend to treat it as a structurally determined social category with a predetermined political nature. I propose an alternative theory that recognizes subjectivity as the struggle to realize certain possibilities within a given set of historical conditions, and the history of African teachers' politics in South Africa offers an excellent opportunity to investigate the forces that shape middle class politics. I have chosen to focus on African teachers because very little research has been conducted on this, the largest, Black professional occupational category in South Africa, and because of the strategic structural location that teachers occupied during the political upheavals of the 1970's and the 1980's. African teachers offered an excellent opportunity to study middle class politics precisely because of their location in a social institution that was placed at the center of hegemonic struggles in contemporary South African politics. By focusing on teachers and teachers' politics this work explores how a middle class identity was actively produced by educated Africans, and how the political identification of teachers was itself the object and outcome of hegemonic struggles within teachers' politics.