Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Greg:
No fuss. Same as going to England or Greece or anywhere.…
Or would you also be interested looking at other countries—North America
or Australia?
Max:
Well, we'd be very interested in North America, but the passport issues are
difficult, and I think to get into North America is difficult. So, for that reas-
on it's easier for us to try and get into Europe.
Greg:
Greg here clearly demonstrates the interaction of ability and choice in his discussion
ofpossibleemigrationdestinations.HeandhiswifewouldliketoliveinNorthAmerica
and not Australia. However, the easiest path is into the EU. Having lived in the UK pre-
viously, Greg, despite his possession of a British passport, has no desire to move back
there, but would be able to use that passport to move to Sweden, a country to which
neither he nor his wife have ancestral ties.
Jane's decision to bestow future motility to her family was quite strategic, in that she
intentionally planned on having her baby in the UK before returning to South Africa so
that, unlike in Daniel's family, he would in future have a UK passport and thus ease the
possibility of migration at the scale of the family:
So how did you come to decide that it was actually, now was the time to go
home?
Max:
WellwehadplanneditthatIwantedmychildtohaveaBritishpassport.So
I fell pregnant and we planned that we were gonna come back after he was
born.
Jane:
Max:
Was it a planned pregnancy?
Jane:
Ja.
Max:
How come you wanted him to have a British passport?
Jane:
So that he had an opportunity to go back.
Through her own reproductive decision making Jane is thus creating embodied mi-
gration histories of the present in which her British lineage is reaffirmed as a whiteness
privileged with motility, and highlighting the role of individual agency in reproducing
the privileges associated with the visa whiteness machine.
Conclusion
In this article, I have engaged with the literature on whiteness in geography and South
African studies, bodies of work that primarily posit race as just that—a socially con-
structed and fictitious epistemology of power relations framed through discourse and
