Caught between the ‘old’ and the ‘new’? Talking about ‘race’ in a post‐apartheid university classroom

Abstract

This paper explores difficulties in talking about ‘race’ and difference in a post‐apartheid university classroom. The data come from classroom‐based research conducted in a first‐year undergraduate English Studies course at a historically ‘white’ and Afrikaans university in South Africa. Drawing on poststructuralist ideas on discourse and the self, discourse and society, I analyse moments from classroom discourse and argue that the ways in which the students talk and think about ‘race’ and culture echo both resonances of the past as well as discourses in current circulation. I draw on the Bakhtinian notion of heteroglossia in order to understand why ‘race’ is simultaneously a taboo topic and an important self‐identifier (the product of both apartheid discourses of discrimination and post‐apartheid discourses of equity and redress) and argue for the need to deconstruct essentialist notions of ‘race’ and culture in the post‐apartheid classroom.