{"id":11987,"date":"2011-02-07T23:10:49","date_gmt":"2011-02-07T23:10:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=11987"},"modified":"2012-03-24T18:52:34","modified_gmt":"2012-03-24T18:52:34","slug":"not-white-enough-not-black-enough-racial-identity-in-the-south-african-coloured-community-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=11987","title":{"rendered":"Not White Enough, Not Black Enough: Racial Identity in the South African Coloured Community [Review]"},"content":{"rendered":"

Not White Enough, Not Black Enough: Racial Identity in the South African Coloured Community [Review]<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

H-Net Reviews<\/a>
\nMay 2007<\/p>\n

Sean H. Jacobs
\n<\/strong>University of Michigan, Ann Arbor<\/em><\/p>\n

Mohamed Adhikari. Not White Enough, Not Black Enough: Racial Identity in the South African Coloured Community<\/a><\/em>. Africa Series. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005. xvii + 252 pp. Paper ISBN 978-0-89680-244-5.<\/p>\n

Coloured Categories<\/strong><\/p>\n

What are “Coloureds<\/a>“? For most South Africans and others familiar with South Africa<\/a> the answer will be “people of mixed race.” This invocation of “mixing” inevitably links to a racial binary that relies on two opposing and ossified (primordial) identities of black and white. Linked to this view is of course the persistence of the stereotype of “tragic mulattoes<\/a>“\u2014long a trope in South African writing\u2014in which the “products of miscegenation<\/a>” can never be “true” South Africans. These were the views of apartheid’s planners and retain their resonance for most South Africans today, including many whom self-identify as Coloured.<\/p>\n

Mohamed Adhikari’s<\/a> work attempts a corrective to this kind of de-contextualized portrayal and assessment of Coloured politics and identity. In Not White Enough, Not Black Enough\u2014<\/em>a slim volume of 187 pages\u2014Adhikari attempts to place Colouredness as a product, not of any biological process such as “mixture,” but rather as one of the politics of the last century or so. For him, Coloured identity is, in fact, both a product of apartheid<\/a> category-making and of vigorous identity-building on the part of Coloured political actors themselves. That is, Adhikari also targets attempts to “do away” with Coloured identity, as by proclaiming it a species of false consciousness. The book’s main focus is on attempts by Coloureds themselves to construct identity and history. While much of the material he covers is useful and interesting, it is not clear that Adhikari has quite managed to get out from under the weight of inherited categories and analytic frames in quite the way he sets out to do.<\/p>\n

Coloureds make up 4.1 million of South Africa’s 46.9 million people. Mostly working class and concentrated in (but not restricted to) the Western Cape<\/a> Province (where they comprise 53.9 percent of the total population) and the more rural Northern Cape<\/a>, they, along with Africans\u2014despite some changes at the apex of the class pyramid\u2014account for most of South Africa’s urban and rural poor…<\/p>\n

Read the entire review here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Not White Enough, Not Black Enough: Racial Identity in the South African Coloured Community [Review] H-Net Reviews May 2007 Sean H. Jacobs University of Michigan, Ann Arbor Mohamed Adhikari. Not White Enough, Not Black Enough: Racial Identity in the South African Coloured Community. Africa Series. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005. xvii + 252 pp. Paper […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1295,12,5,125,8,394,520],"tags":[3036,2503,5396,5397,20756],"class_list":["post-11987","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-africa","category-articles","category-book-reviews","category-identitydevelopment","category-media-archive","category-socialscience","category-south-africa","tag-h-net-reviews","tag-mohamed-adhikari","tag-sean-h-jacobs","tag-sean-jacobs","tag-south-africa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11987","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11987"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11987\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11987"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11987"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11987"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}