‘It's just taking our souls back’: discourses of apartheid and race

Bock, Zannie; Hunt, Sally

Title: ‘It's just taking our souls back’: discourses of apartheid and race
Creator: Bock, Zannie
Creator: Hunt, Sally
Date Issued: 2015
Date: 2015
Type: text
Type: article
Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/124888
Identifier: vital:35707
Identifier: https://doi.org/10.2989/16073614.2015.1056196
Description: Although apartheid officially ended in 1994, the issue of race as a primary identity marker has continued to permeate many aspects of private and public life in post-apartheid South Africa. This paper seeks to understand how youth at two South African tertiary institutions position themselves in relation to race and the apartheid past. Our data include four focus group interviews from two universities, one which can be described as historically ‘black’ and the other as historically ‘white’. Given the complex nature of the data, we elected to use a combination of corpus linguistics and discourse analysis as our methodological approach. We explore how words such as black, white, coloured, they, we, us and them feature in the interviews. Our analysis shows that the positioning by the interviewees reflects a complexity and ambivalence that is at times contradictory although several broader discourse patterns can be distilled. In particular, we argue, that all groups employ a range of discursive strategies so as to resist being positioned in the historical positions of ‘victim’ and ‘perpetrator’. Our paper reflects on these findings as well as what they offer us as we attempt to chart new discourses of the future.
Format: 19 pages
Format: pdf
Language: English
Relation: Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies
Relation: Bock, Z. and Hunt, S., 2015. ‘It's just taking our souls back’: discourses of apartheid and race. Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies, 33(2), pp.141-158
Relation: Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies volume 33 number 2 141 158 2015 1607-3614
Rights: Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies
Rights: Use of this resource is governed by the terms and conditions of the Taylor & Francis Online Terms & Conditions Statement (https://www.tandfonline.com/terms-and-conditions)

Hits: 820
Visitors: 955
Downloads: 141

Collections

Hunt, Sally Ann (Dr)

RU Department of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies

SDG 10. Reduced Inequalities

		Thumbnail	File	Description	Size	Format
View Details Download			SOURCE1	It s just taking our souls back discourses of apartheid and race.pdf	520 KB	Adobe Acrobat PDF	View Details Download