The role of place and metaphor in racial exclusion: South Africa's beaches as sites of shifting racialization
- 1 January 2001
- journal article
- Published by Informa UK Limited in Ethnic and Racial Studies
- Vol. 24 (3), 433-450
- https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870020036738
Abstract
This article examines the rhetoric of racial exclusion as applied to South Africa's beaches between 1982 and 1995, a period during which beach apartheid was progressively dismantled. Using a sample of 400 newspaper articles as textual evidence, we demonstrate how racist rhetoric during this period exploited ideological constructions of space and place. We focus on a set of arguments that constructed beaches as the legitimate preserve of the (white) family and black beach-goers as a threat to this place image. The shift from the old to the new South Africa provides a historical lens through which we view the variable deployment of this familiar rhetoric of transgression and exclusion. Whereas in the 1980s, black political protest was portrayed as disrupting the 'fun-in-the-sun' essence of beaches, in the 1990s a neo-separatist discourse of manners predominated. References to beaches as family places were used multiply and variably to justify racial exclusion and segregationKeywords
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