Unsettling whiteness

Abstract

Archives are sites of memory and forgetting. They provide insights into the past and into the passions, preoccupations and struggles present at their instantiation. This paper draws on narratives of whites submitted to the Apartheid Archives Project to explore how whiteness is experienced in the present, in the shadow of apartheid, and in a post-apartheid era. It shows how being white is now experienced as unsettling by many narrators and how whiteness itself is becoming unsettled. Racial melancholia and the notion of the fetish are invoked to understand both the experience of an unsettling whiteness and the importance of unsettling whiteness as a category.