Towards critical cultural openness: (in)vulnerability in white student narratives of transformation in South Africa

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the politics of emotion in white students’ experiential narratives about institutional attempts to transform racial demographics and relationships within residences at a historically white South African university. Three distinct narrative forms are presented each with a unique emotional politics constructed around the tropes of “culture” and “tradition”. The “white victim” and “white saviour” narratives demonstrate an emotional investment in maintaining a sense of invulnerability combined with a politics of denial of continued racial injustice. In contrast, a third narrative form “out of my comfort zone” demonstrates an opening through which some white students are coming to challenge the comfortable norms of whiteness both internally as well as externally. The paper argues that through coming to embody the emotional position of vulnerability these students have developed a transformative capacity for “critical cultural openness” which represents a different emotional politics to the white victim and white saviour narratives.

KEYWORDS:

• Transformation
• whiteness
• vulnerability
• narrative
• culture
• race

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela and an anonymous reviewer for Ethnic and Racial Studies for their incredibly useful comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

I would like to thank the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for a Postdoctoral Fellowship which allowed me to write this paper at the Historical Trauma and Transformation Research Initiative at Stellenbosch University.