The visa whiteness machine: Transnational motility in post-apartheid South Africa

Abstract

Throughout the history of South Africa, but especially since the end of apartheid, white South Africans have left, and returned to, the country in significant numbers. Because of political arrangements, ancestral privileges and perceived cultural affinities, the plurality migrate to the UK. Drawing on new materialist approaches to race, in this article I emphasize the links between past and present histories of migration between the UK and South Africa in order to explore the construction of an embodied transnational whiteness. Because they have recent ancestors who emigrated from Britain, or other countries now in the EU, during the colonial, segregationist and apartheid periods, many white South Africans have the automatic right to visas to live and work in the UK, and hundreds of thousands have left — and returned — since 1994. Drawing on a series of in-depth interviews with white South African return migrants in Durban, largest city in the province formerly known as Natal — commonly called the ‘last outpost of the British Empire’ — I argue that, through what I call the ‘visa whiteness machine’, whiteness as a racial formation — neither a natural fact nor simply a discourse — emerges not discursively but materially as certain bodies with European ancestry and phenotype come to stick together through their motility — their immanent ability to move in particular circuits through transnational space. In the uneasily globalizing post-apartheid moment, pre-histories of colonial movement thus hang spectrally — and materially — over the present, as spatialized/racialized identities are contested, reconstructed and reinscribed through emigration and return.