{"id":54638,"date":"2017-11-09T03:16:00","date_gmt":"2017-11-09T03:16:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=54638"},"modified":"2017-11-09T03:16:56","modified_gmt":"2017-11-09T03:16:56","slug":"steeped-in-heritage-the-racial-politics-of-south-african-rooibos-tea","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=54638","title":{"rendered":"Steeped in Heritage: The Racial Politics of South African Rooibos Tea"},"content":{"rendered":"

Steeped in Heritage: The Racial Politics of South African Rooibos Tea<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Duke University Press<\/a>
\n2017-10-27
\n272 pages
\n3 illustrations
\nHardcover ISBN: 978-0-8223-6993-6
\nPaperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-6993-6<\/p>\n

Sarah Ives<\/strong><\/a>, Postdoctoral Fellow and Lecturer
\nStanford University<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

South African rooibos tea<\/a> is a commodity of contrasts. Renowned for its healing properties, the rooibos plant grows in a region defined by the violence of poverty, dispossession, and racism. And while rooibos is hailed as an ecologically indigenous commodity, it is farmed by people who struggle to express \u201cauthentic\u201d belonging to the land: Afrikaners<\/a> who espouse a \u201cwhite\u201d African indigeneity and \u201ccoloureds<\/a>,\u201d who are characterized either as the mixed-race progeny of \u201cextinct\u201d Bushmen<\/a> or as possessing a false identity, indigenous to nowhere. In Steeped in Heritage<\/em>\u00a0Sarah Ives explores how these groups advance alternate claims of indigeneity based on the cultural ownership of an indigenous plant. This heritage-based struggle over rooibos shows how communities negotiate landscapes marked by racial dispossession within an ecosystem imperiled by climate change and precarious social relations in the post-apartheid<\/a> era.<\/p>\n

Table of Contents<\/strong><\/p>\n