Abstract
“Facing marginalization in the political context of the ‘new South Africa’ and lost social and economic privileges under a Black government, South African Indians articulate the need to keep up culture. In so doing, they simultaneously extend the isolation fostered through apartheid and utilize newly available political language to assert a partially disadvantaged minority voice in a distinctly gendered and racialized way. Echoing the spirit of nationalism in colonial India that figured the bourgeois Indian woman as the essence of the national culture, South African Indians reinvent a feminine icon of Indian culture for distinctly political ends. At the individual level, gendered participants in this project of cultural nationalism enact, resist, and reshape its meanings, exposing both the limitations and the possibilities for South African national identities.”
My deepest gratitude goes to Raka Ray, Gillian Hart, and Peter Evans for the personal and academic advice that made this project possible and to the Social Science Research Council for its generous support of this research. Most of all, I am indebted to the dozens of women in South Africa who opened their lives, homes, and hearts to me.
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Notes
- 1.
Comb and pencil tests were routinely conducted during apartheid to categorize people whose racial groups were not phenotypically evident. Simply put, a comb or pencil would be pulled through an individual’s hair. If it stuck, then the individual could not be categorized as white.
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Radhakrishnan, S. (2018). “Time to Show Our True Colors”: The Gendered Politics of “Indianness” in Post-Apartheid South Africa. In: Misir, P. (eds) The Subaltern Indian Woman. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-5166-1_10
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