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Privileged Precariat

White Workers and South Africa's Long Transition to Majority Rule

Häftad, Engelska, 2024

AvDanelle van Zyl-Hermann

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White workers occupied a unique social position in apartheid-era South Africa. Shielded from black labour competition in exchange for support for the white minority regime, their race-based status effectively concealed their class-based vulnerability. Centred on this entanglement of race and class, Privileged Precariat examines how South Africa's white workers experienced the dismantling of the racial state and the establishment of black majority rule. Starting from the 1970s, it shows how apartheid reforms constituted the withdrawal of state support for working-class whiteness, sending workers in search of new ways to safeguard their interests in a rapidly changing world. Danelle van Zyl-Hermann tracks the shifting strategies of the blue-collar Mineworkers' Union, culminating in its reinvention, by the 2010s, as the Solidarity Movement, a social movement appealing to cultural nationalism. Integrating unique historical and ethnographic evidence with global debates, Privileged Precariat offers a chronological and interpretative rethinking of South Africa's recent past and contributes new insights from the Global South to debates on race and class in the era of neoliberalism.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum2024-06-20
Mått152 x 229 x 19 mm
Vikt518 g
FormatHäftad
SpråkEngelska
SerieThe International African Library
Antal sidor358
FörlagCambridge University Press
ISBN9781108927208

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Danelle van Zyl-Hermann is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of History at the University of Basel, Switzerland, and a Research Associate with the International Studies Group at the University of the Free State, South Africa. Her research on the entanglement of race and class, and the politics of whiteness in Africa has been published in various international journals. She is the co-editor of Rethinking White Societies in Southern Africa, 1930s–1990s (2020), a regional history of poor and working-class whites during colonialism and white minority rule.

Introduction: The Return of the White Working Class; Part I: White Workers and the Racial State; 1. Privileged Race, Precarious Class: White Labour from the Mineral Revolution to the 'Golden Age'; 2. From Sweetheart to 'Frankenstein': The NP's Changing Stance Towards White Labour Amid the Crisis of the 1970s; 3. Race and Rights at the Rock-Face of Change: White Organised Labour and the Wiehahn Reforms; Part II: White Workers and Civil Society Mobilisation; 4. From Trade Union to Social Movement: The MWU/Solidarity's Formation of a Post-Apartheid Social Alliance; 5. An 'Alternative Government': The Solidarity Movement's Contemporary Strategies; 6. Discursive Labour and Strategic Contradiction: Managing the Working-Class Roots of a Declassed Organisation; 7. 'Guys Like Us Are Left To Our Own Mercy': Counternarratives, Ambivalence and the Pressures of Racial Gatekeeping Among Solidarity's Blue-Collar Members; Conclusion; Bibliography; Index.

'An important contribution to both historical and social science scholarship on South Africa, this account of white labour politics, with particular emphasis on Afrikaners [traces the trajectory of white trade unions from the militantly anti-capitalist but racially exclusivist battles of the early 20th Century, through an ambiguously privileged situation under apartheid, to recent attempts to adjust to majority rule. The book shows that white society was never fully unitary, but always reflected class divisions. This outstanding work combines innovative archival scholarship with the author's remarkable field-work study on the Solidarity movement of recent years.' Jonathan Hyslop, Colgate University and University of Pretoria