“remember that a white woman is a white man”: Ronelda S. Kamfer’s Black Feminist Poetry as Corrective to the Race Logic of White Afrikaans Literary Feminisms

Abstract

Abstract The creation of the Afrikaner volk and the violent appropriation and institutionalization of the Afrikaans language as white cultural property around the beginning of the twentieth century in South Africa was a patriarchal project from the outset. The canon of Afrikaans literature reflects both the erasure of Black subjects from the official history and recorded footprint of the language as well as the failure of white Afrikaans feminism to challenge these erasures and patriarchal structures of white power. In this essay we argue that Ronelda Kamfer’s poetry collection Chinatown (2019) functions as a powerful corrective to literary Afrikaans whitestream feminism and that Kamfer’s defiant relational intersectionality enables an alternative way of world-making beyond the disciplinary mechanisms and exclusionary technologies of white colonial patriarchy.