Negotiating Diasporic Whiteness In Post-apartheid South Africa

As a response to the critical turn in intercultural communication research,this thesis examines how white South Africans reconstruct,reposition and rearticulate their diasporic whiteness in the changing social and political landscape of post-apartheid South Africa in J.M.Coetzee's novel Disgrace.Drawing upon the interdisciplinary theoretical framework of “diasporic whiteness”,this thesis explores the contradictory,ambivalent and intersectional positionality that white South Africans possess.A critical intercultural reading of the novel reveals that whiteness operates as a skilled shape-shifter in disguising the asymmetrical power relations in its intercultural encounter with the non-white “others”,and the unmarked privileged positionality of whiteness is severely challenged in the new dispensation.Through adding a diasporic dimension into the critical reading of whiteness in J.M.Coetzee's Disgrace,this thesis argues that the white subject is displaced from its prior centralized subject position of “the mighty” to a de-centered diasporic position of the “unhomed” outsider.Stuck in an estranged state of belonging,white South Africans need to rethink what it means to be white in the post-apartheid space of South Africa.And their quest for a sense of home in the changed political dynamics is fundamentally characterized by the dynamic interplay between “roots” and “routes”.Faced with the white-in-Africa dilemma,this thesis finally suggests that genuine interracial reconciliation is possible only when the mask of blindness and solipsism is removed from the eyes of the displaced and disgraced white subjectivities,and home is to be found only when the heart is able to sympathize.