Abstract
This chapter draws on the insights of research on nine Indian-white biracial youths to consider how they interpret their social reality. Life-history research was used to discover the complexities that make up the participants’ everyday lives and to understand what they believe about themselves. The key findings reveal that the participants’ struggles with identity indicate the complexity of identity, but those struggles are not always related to race. The participants’ descriptions of their identity formation reveal an ongoing dialectical process that involved the making of choices among various social identities as they moved from one circumstance to another. Drawing on different postcolonial perspectives, my chapter contributes to the cultural confidence of biracial people living in South Africa who have endured years of apartheid legislation, racial oppression, and marginaliza-tion. Most importantly, my findings are likely to trouble theorists on marginality because I argue that labelling groups of individuals as marginal provides those groups with a coherent identity from which resistant counter-identities may be formulated.
An earlier version of this chapter appeared in Acta Academica (2008), 40(3), 33–51.
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© 2012 Jennifer M. Lavia and Sechaba Mahlomaholo
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Francis, D. (2012). Border Crossing: Conversations About Race, Identity, and Agency in South Africa. In: Lavia, J.M., Mahlomaholo, S. (eds) Culture, Education, and Community. Palgrave Macmillan’s Postcolonial Studies in Education. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137013125_8
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