Exploring white Afrikaner identity through filmic fantasy tropes

Abstract

This dissertation aims to explore how fantasy tropes and Afrikaans mythological narratives can be used to create a framework for a fantasy screenplay that critically engages with white Afrikaner identity. The investigation is undertaken to explore how fantasy may be used to question what, I argue, is a liminal state of white Afrikaner identity. This liminal identity is likely a consequence of the uprooting of historical identity markers in the course of South Africa’s shift to democracy in 1994. Many young white Afrikaners are attempting to reimagine a white Afrikaner identity distanced from historical Afrikaner nationalist identity markers (Álvarez-Mosquera, 2017: 640). However, such attempts at reimagining identity and, hence, engaging with South Africa’s post-apartheid context are arguably not often reflected in Afrikaans film. The study explores how the fantasy genre may be used to address the perceived lack of engagement of Afrikaans-language films with the post-apartheid socio-political context of South Africa. Moreover, this study addresses what, in my view, is a lack of fantasy films in the Afrikaans film industry. Film functions as a “cultural text” (Steyn 2016: 4) that has become a way of depicting the social world, a means through which people construct meaning about the social world and which, arguably, might influence how they engage with the social world. This is also the case for Afrikaans film, a medium through which many white Afrikaners continue to imagine their comm(unity) on the basis of the nostalgic representation of pre-1994 markers of white Afrikaner identity which manifest as film tropes. By means of these tropes, white Afrikaners maintain their imagining of their cultural identity as an imagined community. In this sense, Afrikaans film can be seen as a mode of myth-making.

Fantasy draws from myth to construct imaginative fictional worlds that are ontologically ruptured from phenomenal reality. This rupture, which functions as the supernatural ‘nova’, evokes estrangement through which audiences are critically distanced from their own realities. It is through this distancing that new perspectives can be formed and, hypothetically, that the identity that is represented in the myths can be reimagined within the fantasy world. I identify tropes of the fantasy genre on the basis of Vogler’s (2007) writer’s journey plot structure, Indick’s (2012) fantasy character-archetypes, as well as salient tropes pertaining to fantasy themes, settings and visual iconography. Through these tropes, I investigate how fantasy worlds are constructed, and I discuss how the tropes function to create a critical distance from phenomenal reality. I then investigate how this critical distance might allow for the reimagining of identity within the boundaries of the fictional filmic world. Thereafter, I investigate white Afrikaner identity through the lens of cultural narrative identity. This lens is employed to consider Turner’s (1969) theory of liminality, Anderson’s (2006) imagined communities, and Bhabha’s (1990; 1994) theories of nation as narration, the third space of enunciation and cultural hybridity. These theories are applicable to my study as they are concerned with culture and its hybridity, the role narration plays in the imagining of collective identities, and the impact of rupturing those identities from the myths through which they are imagined. Using the lens of cultural narrative identity, cultural identity is understood as imagined through the myths that construct it, thereby positioning cultural identity as a process of myth-making.

I then explore Afrikaner mythological narratives as indicators of white Afrikaner cultural narrative identity, and I identify fantasy tropes in them. To do so, I use thematic analysis as a methodological approach to identify fantasy tropes in these Afrikaner mythologies (FTAMs). This analysis is undertaken on a sample of Afrikaner mythologies which include originary myths and folklore, fables, fairy tales and legends. The identified FTAMs are applied alongside my adaptation of Vogler’s (2007) writer’s journey – from which I construct a new plot-structure framework aimed at subverting white Afrikaner identity. Together, these are used to construct the framework which, in turn, guides the creative implementation of the FTAMs in the process of writing a fantasy screenplay.

The study demonstrates that by using fantasy tropes, understanding Afrikaans mythological narratives as expressions of white Afrikaner identity through the lens of cultural narrative identity, and identifying how fantasy tropes manifest in Afrikaner mythological narratives, I am able to construct a framework that can used as a guide to write a fantasy screenplay aimed at questioning white Afrikaner identity. The framework might enable this questioning by rupturing Afrikaner cultural narrative identity from phenomenal reality by means of the use of fantasy tropes, thereby allowing for the reimagination of white Afrikaner identity within the bounds of the fictional world.