‘A sort of black and white past and present thing’: high school students’ subject positions on South Africa’s recent past

Abstract

This article examines the discursive positions South African high school students take up in response to a teaching intervention that invites them to historicize their identities. It thus seeks to contribute to the growing body of education research on how to meaningfully engage young people in post-conflict societies with their recent past. Drawing on lesson transcripts as well as post-intervention focus group discussions with students in two different high schools, I use poststructuralist theories of discourse and subjectivity to attempt to understand students’ reluctance to see themselves as historically located. The analysis shows that students feel interpellated in uncomfortable ways by a historical narrative that works to tie subject positions to fixed, racialized identities. Their attempts to escape these predetermined positions constitute ongoing negotiation of multiple discourses tied to race, history and their generational locations. Implications for curriculum and pedagogy are briefly considered.

Keywords:

• Subjectivity
• positioning
• youth
• history
• race
• post-conflict society
• Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC)

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Grade 11 is the eleventh and penultimate year of high school in South Africa with students being typically 16 to 17 years-old.

2. The only exception to this was a focus group comprising five Afrikaans girls, constituted by the researcher in response to the increasing salience of these students’ Afrikaans identities. For a detailed analysis, see Ferreira (2014).

3. Established racial labels are used in identifying students in order to show how the symbolic meanings attached to race may or may not be shifting. The scare quotes conventionally used around the word race and race labels to question their validity have, however, been omitted because they should be understood.

4. The following abbreviations are used when quoting from transcripts: S = Site; L = Lesson; FG = Focus Group. Secondary speakers’ speech is inserted in round brackets; researcher’s explanatory comments are inserted in square brackets.

5. All names are pseudonyms.

6. This is largely the consequence of most students having interviewed family members or other same-race community members.

7. Earlier reconciliation work (Ferreira and Janks 2007) that relied on students gathering oral narratives also showed mixed results; the greatest degree of success was evident in a class with significant levels of racial heterogeneity among the students.