Whites writing whiteness: letters, domestic figurations and representations of whiteness in South Africa 1770s-1970s

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South African society and its changes over time is of particular social science interest, as a crucible for exploring the mechanisms of social change, including what became its distinctive overlapping hierarchies of racialed, gendered & classed inequalities, organised around segregation and institutionalised apartheid. Latterly, its democratic transition has been a model for social transformation. Focusing just on the recent period, however, glosses a constant process of more fragmentary changes: away from 'high' politics, ordinary people of all skin colours and language groups have lived out its racial formations in different ways over time. The 'Whites Writing Whiteness' project captures this through investigating 'whites writing' and 'writing whiteness' in letter-writing and correspondences from the 1770s to the 1970s, a crucial period in its history. This attention to epistolary exchanges gives focus onto the small white population and through this addresses the representation of whiteness as a social category and the related creation of racialised hierarchies within what over time became a highly racialised social system. A strong case exists for researching and using letter-writing as an appropriate and effective source for investigating social change: it is a relational activity which brings together affective and material aspects of social life, it is highly responsive to changing social mores and conventions, and consequently it provides a lens on the changing ways in which white people lived, perceived and represented whiteness (and by implication blackness too) to each other over this momentous time period.How and why did social change in South Africa take the form it did? In what ways was this experienced, from the early colonial period, through imperialist intervention, to the 1948 National Party election victory and apartheid, and the 1970s & the winds of change? What resistances and accommodations occurred in different areas of the country, and from individuals and networks of different political, economic and religious standing? How did people represent such changes over time in their letters, correspondences and other 'documents of life'? The proposed research will investigate and theorise changing representations of whiteness in the context of social, economic and political change from the 1770s to the 1970s so as to address and answer these important research questions regarding racialisation.The research base is provided by detailed investigations of c25-30 family collections which span at least three and up to six generations between the 1770s & the 1970s (when the last letters were written) and case studies of a sub-set of c12. The collections and archives are located across South Africa, contain very large numbers of personal and family letters and correspondences and in some cases diaries, reflective notebooks and other auto/biographical writings, and with marked changes in family fortunes occurring for these families over time. The data will be managed using an online Virtual Research Environment (VRE) developed for a preceding ESRC project.The Fellowship proposal provides a cohesive programme of work which encompasses the investigation of letters and correspondences from the 1770s to the 1970s focusing on white families of the 'middling sort', and also draws together ideas, insights and data from across my researches in South Africa to theorise whiteness and its creation of racialised categories, hierarchies and social practices. It enables a research base built up through successfully completed projects since 1994 to be taken forward in a substantial and innovative new direction.