Abstract:
South Africa’s transition to democracy coincided and interlinked with massive global shifts,
including the fall of communism and the rise of western capitalist triumphalism. Late capitalism
operates through paradoxical global-local dynamics, both universalising identities and
expanding local particularities. The erstwhile hegemonic identity of apartheid, ‘the Afrikaner’,
was a product of Afrikaner nationalism. Like other identities, it was spatially organised, with
Afrikaner nationalism projecting its imagined community (‘the volk’) onto a national territory
(‘white South Africa’). The study traces the neo-nationalist spatial permutations of ‘the
Afrikaner’, following Massey’s (2005) understanding of space as (1) political, (2) produced
through interrelations ranging from the global to micro intimacies, (3) potentially a sphere for
heterogeneous co-existence, and (4) continuously created. Research is presented that shows a
neo-nationalist revival of ethnic privileges in a defensive version of Hall’s ‘return to the local’
(1997a). Although Afrikaner nationalism’s territorial claims to a nation state were defeated,
neo-nationalist remnants reclaim a purchase on white Afrikaans identities, albeit in shrunken
territories. This phenomenon is, here, called Afrikaner enclave nationalism. Drawing on a
global revamping of race as a category of social subjugation, a strategy is deployed that is here
called ‘inward migration’. These dynamics produce a privatised micro-apartheid in sites
ranging from homes, to commercial and religious enterprises, to suburbs. Virtual white spaces
in the form of Afrikaans media products serve as extensions of these whitened locales. The
lynchpin holding it all together is the heteronormative, middle-class family, with consumption
the primary mode of the generation of its white comfort zones.
