How can recent developments in post-structuralist, post-Marxist, and psychoanalytical theory actually inform ongoing empirical research? What are the appropriate methods and research strategies for conducting research in discourse theory and analysis? How can concepts such as hegemony, identity, the imaginary, dislocation, and empty signifiers illuminate key aspects of contemporary society and politics? This pathbreaking and multi-focal book contains a clear introductory statement of the theoretical approach used, and concludes with an assessment of the future directions of discourse theory in the social sciences.
* What do we mean by discourse? * What are the different conceptions of discourse and methods of discourse analysis in the contemporary social sciences? * How can this concept help to clarify key theoretical problems and illuminate empirical cases? The concept of discourse provokes considerable debate and is understood in a variety of ways in the contemporary social sciences. This text presents a comprehensive overview of the different conceptions and methods of discourse analysis, while setting out the traditions of thinking in which these conceptions have emerged. It surveys structuralist, post-structuralist and post-Marxist theory, and the author sets out a fresh approach to discourse analysis, drawing principally on the writings of Saussure, Levi-Strauss, Gramsci, Althusser, Foucault, Derrida, Laclau and Mouffe. He evaluates a number of pertinent criticisms of this approach, and explores ways in which discourse analysis can assist our understanding of identity formation, hegemony, and the relationship between structure and agency. This concise and engaging text provides a stimulating introduction to the concept of discourse for students and researchers across the social sciences.
How were whites implicated in and shaped by apartheid culture and society, and how did they contribute to it? In Ordinary Whites in Apartheid Society, historian Neil Roos traces the lives of ordinary white people in South Africa during the apartheid years, beginning in 1948 when the National Party swept into power on the back of its catchall apartheid slogan. Drawing on his own family's story and others, Roos explores how working-class whites frequently defied particular aspects of the apartheid state but seldom opposed or even acknowledged the idea of racial supremacy, which lay at the heart of the apartheid society. This cognitive dissonance afforded them a way to simultaneously accommodate and oppose apartheid and allowed them to later claim they never supported the apartheid system. Ordinary Whites in Apartheid Society offers a telling reminder that the politics and practice of race, in this case apartheid-era whiteness, derive not only from the top, but also from the bottom.
An African Volk explores how the apartheid state sought to maintain power as the world of white empire gave way to a new post-colonial environment that repudiated racial hierarchy.
White Belongings: Race, Land, and Property in Post-Apartheid South Africa deepens ongoing critical deconstruction of the role of whiteness in maintaining racial order. Scott Burnett , argues that the protection of white entitlement and cultural connection to the land are intimately interwoven, using detailed discourse analysis of campaigns aimed at preventing rhino poaching, stopping fracking in the Karoo, and advocating for the existence of a poverty “crisis,” which reveal how whites hold on to their “belongings” in everyday talk. White Belongings goes beyond the preoccupation with identity in whiteness studies to elaborate how specific subject roles and institutions are motivated and rationalized in hegemonic discursive regimes.
This book explores what happened to the homelands – in many ways the ultimate apartheid disgrace – after the fall of apartheid. The nine chapters contribute to understanding the multiple configurations that currently exist in areas formerly declared "homelands" or "Bantustans". Using the concept of frontier zones, the homelands emerge as areas in which the future of the South African postcolony is being renegotiated, contested and remade with hyper-real intensity. This is so because the many fault lines left over from apartheid (its loose ends, so to speak) – between white and black; between different ethnicities; between rich and poor; or differentiated by gender, generation and nationality; between "traditions" and "modernities" or between wilderness and human habitation – are particularly acute and condensed in these so-called "communal areas". Hence, the book argues that it is particularly in these settings that the postcolonial promise of liberation and freedom must face its test. As such, the book offers highly nuanced and richly detailed analyses that go to the heart of the diverse dilemmas of post-apartheid South Africa as a whole, but simultaneously also provides in condensed form an extended case study on the predicaments of African postcoloniality in general. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Southern African Studies.
Race, Memory and the Apartheid Archive: Towards a Transformative Psychosocial Praxis draws on a psychosocial approach that is uniquely suited to the socio-historical and psychical analysis of racism. The book relies mainly on the memories, stories and narratives of ordinary people living in apartheid South Africa.
Laclau: A Critical Reader is the first full-length critical appraisal of Laclau's work and includes contributions from several leading philosophers and theorists. The first section examines Laclau's theory that the contest between universalism and particularism provides much of the philosophical background to political and social struggle, taking up the important place accorded to, amongst others, Hegel and Lacan in Laclau's work. The second section of the book considers what Laclau's 'radical democracy' might look like and reflects on its ethical implications, particularly in relation to Laclau's post-Marxism and thinkers such as Jürgen Habermas. The final section investigates the place of hegemony in Laclau's work, the idea for which he is perhaps best-known. This stimulating collection also includes replies to his critics by Laclau and the important exchange between Laclau and Judith Butler on equality, making it an excellent companion to Laclau's work and essential reading for students of political and social theory.