Landscaping Privilege - Geographies of Privilege - page 95

Clearlythisisacomplexamalgam:ontheonehand,spaceoffersLaurenanimportant
resource for the construction of the liberal identity she desires, and in her ability to ne-
gotiate this to her own ends, it can be argued that, albeit in a different form, her position
is still undoubtedly one of privilege. On the other hand, however, it must be acknow-
ledged that Lauren recognizes this. And, in the making of such identities, there is a hint
that the position of things may also be changing, and perhaps in positive ways. Whilst
the Jozi discourse can be critiqued for offering no more than a superficial nod to mul-
ticulturalism, it is a small step toward imagining a more twenty-first century sense of
citizenship in which British and Afrikaner, black and white South Africans practice a
cospatial existence. It is in the recognition that it is this very cospatiality itself which is
now the privilege for its white peoples that the South African landscape is so revealing.
Acknowledgments
The project “The British in South Africa: Continuity or Change?” was funded by The
British Academy and my Coinvestigator is Daniel Conway, University of Loughbor-
ough, UK. I am very grateful to Daniel for all our inspiring discussions, and to France
Winddance Twine andBradley Gardener fortheir helpful andinsightful advice andsup-
port.
Notes
1 . I will call this group British in this paper to emphasize that the research includes both long- and
short-term expatriates.
2 . South Africa developed a rigid set of racial classifications. People who did not fit into a precisely
definable ethnic group were lumped together into a hold-all category, “coloured.” According to the
Population Registration Act 1950 this included people from the Cape, Malays, Griqua, Chinese,
Indian, Other Asiatic, and Other Coloured (Sparks 1997, 85).
3 . In the United States, for example, this period was also marked by substantial racial and spatial se-
gregation. In the Jim Crow era (1877-1960s), a series of laws and customs were introduced in the
Southern states of the former Confederacy designed to segregate public facilities such as schools,
public places (e.g., toilets), transport, restaurants, and drinking fountains, albeit with a supposed
“separate but equal” ideology. This legalized racial discrimination took place in the South, but in
the North segregatory practices were more covertly institutionalized through, for example, job and
housing discrimination (Hoelscher 2003).
4 . In the United States, reservations were also introduced for American Indians from the 1860s on-
wards,aftertensionsoverlandpossessionbetweenwhitesettlersandNativeAmericans.Thesestill
exist to this day, and some reservations have different laws from the surrounding areas. Not all
tribeshavereservations,andsometribeswereforciblyrelocatedtoareastowhichtheyhadnocon-
nection (Castle and Bee 1992).
5 . This research was conducted with Daniel Conway and was funded by the British Academy.