Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
SaraAhmedwrites,“bodiesareshapedbymotilityandmaytaketheshapeofthatmotil-
ity”(2007,159).IntermsofthinkingthroughtheprismofSouthAfrica'spost-apartheid,
transnationalizing moment, and in tandem with the new “mobilities turn” (Sheller and
Urry 2006), which has attempted to displace the hegemony of sedentarism from social
scientific analysis, I suggest that transnational mobility is not incidental to, or an epi-
phenomenon of, whiteness in South Africa, but is immanent in it. In the contemporary
period, the formulation of whiteness as a “passport of privilege” (Kalra, Kaur, and Hut-
nyk2005)cannotonlystandabstractlyforthetranscendentpowerconsistentlybestowed
onandassociatedwithwhitenessacrosstheglobe,butmustalsobestretchedtoindicate
the emergence of whiteness as a congeries of bodies characterized by their capacity to
move across borders, and how this is linked both to earlier histories of movement and
the current globalizing era. Sherene Razack's (2002) notion of unmapping and Alistair
Bonnett's (2000) discussion of the global history of white identities, among others, can
help situate this. Razack argues that unmapping the fait accompli of whiteness in settler
societies allows us to understand that white countries came to be that way for a reason;
in other words, that social construction is material (cf. Nayak 2006). The demographic
profile of a country, even if those demographic categories are contingent constructions,
is still the outcome of often violent material processes. This includes genocide and dis-
easespreadaswellasimmigrationregulationsthathaveconstructedthephenotypiccon-
stitution ofvarious settler countries (e.g., the White Australia policy orthe regulation of
ChineseimmigrationintheUnitedStates).Whiteningisamaterial,biopoliticalprocess,
as illustrated by, for instance, Australia's stolen generation and the policy of whitening
inVenezuela(Bonnett2000),andthishighlightsthecentralroleofthestateinmediating
transnational flows of bodies in a globalizing world economy.
Similarly, McDonald's (2008) discussion of the whitening of the Cape Town land-
scapethroughremovalofAfricanbodiesfromcentralareashighlightstheimportanceto
the symbolic hegemony of whiteness in the landscape of the sorting of bodies as much
as the discursive scripting of space. This again demonstrates the centrality of the ma-
teriality of the body to formations of racialized geographies. The complex regulation
of transnational (and internal) migration on the part of states as well as supra-state net-
works works as part of an ensemble out of which race emerges. By attending to ances-
try we can argue that through histories of the movement of certain kinds of bodies into
certain national spaces, the presence of white bodies has been materially constituted in
particular places. And it is those white bodies that, through material privilege to move
between South Africa and the UK offered by ancestral regimes of movement, are now
also partially constitutive of the face of elite transnational mobility as we have come to
know it today. I want to argue that the UK's suite of visa and passport arrangements on
