“There’s a drumbeat in Africa”: Embodying imaginary geographies of transnational whiteness in contemporary South Africa

Abstract

Emerging out of a study conducted in Durban of white, English-speaking South Africans (WESSAs) who had previously lived in the UK and elsewhere, this article argues that, because of South Africa’s past and current liminal position within a global meta-geography of whiteness, “imaginative geographies” are centrally important to the construction of transnational WESSA identities. This article uses an expanded concept of imaginative geographies that encompasses not only discursive modes of representation but also the direct, embodied experiences of differential spaces on the part of transmigrants, as informants emphasised their understandings of the spaces in which white bodies were in and out of place. The most frequently deployed imaginative geographies were meta-geographies of “first world” and “third world,” whilst South Africa was discussed as an African space of emotion, authenticity, and freedom and the UK a drab space of conformity, indignity, and discomfort. The data demonstrates that, for WESSA transnationals, South Africa and the UK emerge as geographies in relation to each other. Additionally, I argue that these unstable imaginative geographies offer potential routes to progressive means by which WESSAs can occupy the space of a democratic South Africa.