Living and Feeling Apart. Difference and Identity in South Africa

The definition of the self via difference to an Other constitutes a central concept for understanding identity in the context of South Africa, with regard to both personal and collective identities. Such differences may be hidden or manifested in outward characteristics, such as skin colour. The very peculiarity of racism in South African society lies in the fact that outward difference not only defines one’s self-identity but also the identity ascribed by others, or more specifically, by South African law, as race determined professional as well as private possibilities and limitations. Race was the category according to which spaces were formed and disrupted. Townships formed the abject, the space that should not exist but was nevertheless crucial for South African identities. Farms constituted another anti-space, a heterotopic space in which worlds clashed, where people got lost in time and space. Apartheid produced neuroses, it created crisis of identity and rendered its subjects mute. Its hierarchic power structure combined with specific triggering traumatic events have clearly shaped the identities of all South Africans and invoked a cultural trauma, which may be only understood by outsiders by losing one’s own frame of thought in the literary works of South African novelists. Only by uncovering, resolving, and, finally, understanding the atrocities and feudalities created by Apartheid, not only national identity but also national unity may be achieved, and only then, a brighter future lies ahead.