| In 1994 South Africa's racist apartheid policies, implemented since 1948 by the Afrikaner National Party, were officially dismantled and a new democratic government, led by the African National Congress, was established in its place. The fieldwork that I conducted in southern Ontario focused on the two major transitions that white South African immigrants to Canada, both British and Afrikaner, have experienced: the 1994 political transition in South Africa, and their international migration to and settlement in Canada. In the thesis, I analyze the memories and discourses that informants produced concerning these two transitions. Drawing on the work of Pierre Bourdieu (1977), Antonio Gramsci (1971), and Michel Foucault (1977, 1980), I demonstrate how the hegemony of apartheid shaped the lives of white South Africans. However, their stories are also indicative of a contradictory consciousness in light of apartheid oppression and its continued legacy in South Africa, generating counter-discourses that seek to oppose apartheid logic (Gramsci 1971). (Abstract shortened by UMI.)... |
