O objetivo desta tese é compreender e analisar como a ideia de raça e os significados acerca da branquitude são apropriados e construídos por sujeitos brancos na cidade de São Paulo. A branquitude é entendida aqui como uma construção sócio-histórica produzida pela ideia falaciosa de superioridade racial branca, e que resulta, nas sociedades estruturadas pelo racismo, em uma posição em que os sujeitos identificados como brancos adquirem privilégios simbólicos e materiais em relação aos não brancos. Para a realização deste trabalho apresento uma abordagem conceitual dos estudos sobre branquitude dentro da psicologia social e das ciências humanas. Apresento também seus desdobramentos para o entendimento do racismo contemporâneo, bem como revisão teórica de como o conceito de raça foi produzido a partir do pensamento acadêmico europeu do século XIX e reproduzido no pensamento social paulistano. A pesquisa de campo foi desenvolvida por meio da realização de entrevistas e conversas informais com sujeitos que se auto identi\" caram como brancos de diferentes classes sociais, idade e sexo. Nosso intuito era compreender a heterogeneidade da branquitude nesta cidade. As análises demonstraram que há por parte destes sujeitos a insistência em discursos biológicos e culturais hierárquicos do branco sob outras construções racializadas, e, portanto, o racismo ainda faz parte de um dos traços uni\" cadores da identidade racial branca paulistana. Percebemos também que os significados construídos sobre a branquitude exercem poder sobre o próprio grupo de indivíduos brancos, marcando diferenças e hierarquias internas. Assim, a branquitude é deslocada dentro das diferenças de origem, regionalidade, gênero, fenótipo e classe, o que demonstra que a categoria branco é uma questão internamente controversa e que alguns tipos de branquitude são marcadores de hierarquias da própria categoria / The goal of this dissertation is to understand and analyze how the ideas of race and whiteness are constructed and given meaning by white inhabitants in the city of São Paulo. Whiteness is understood as a social-historical construction produced by the deceptive notion of white racial supremacy. In societies that are structured by racism, whiteness generates a situation in which individuals that are identified as white are given symbolic and material priviledge in relation to those individuals considered not white. I present a review of references in the field of critical whiteness studies connected to Social Psychology and Social Sciences, pointing out its implications to the understanding of contemporary racism. I also present the history of race as a concept formulated in 19th century European academic thought and its reflections in the paulistano social thought in the present. Field research was conducted through interviews and informal conversation with individuals from diverse social class, age and gender that self-identified themselves as white. Our aim was to understand the heterogen caracter of whiteness in São Paulo. Analyses demonstrated that, for these individuals, biological and hieraquic cultural discourses remain as explanation to racial diferences, and racism is still a structural element of paulistano white racial identity. We also noticed that the social meaning that derives from the notion of whiteness operates in white individuals, indicating internal hieraquical diferences. Whiteness is therefore dislocated and relocated in relation to social origin and class, regional, gender and fenotipical diferences, which demonstrates that the category White is internally controversial and that some kinds of whiteness are indicative of hierarquical power within it

Esta pesquisa tem como objetivo analisar a representação das representações das relações raciais na telenovela brasileira. As tramas selecionadas para a realização deste estudo são: \"Da Cor do Pecado\", \"A lua me disse\" e \"Páginas da Vida\", todas exibidas pela Rede Globo de Televisão. Por meio de alguns recursos dos estudos de recepção, analisamos os diálogos das personagens envolvidas nos conflitos raciais, e a leitura desses diálogos realizada pelos estudantes universitários entrevistados no Brasil e em Angola. / This research has the intention to analyze the reception of racial relations presented in the brazilian soap opera. The soap operas chosen for supporting this research are \"Da Cor do Pecado\", \"A lua me disse\" and \"Páginas da Vida\". All of them broadcasted by Globo Channel. Using some resources of the study of reception, we analyze the dialogs of the characters involved in the racial conflicts, and the reading of those dialogs realized by university students interviewed in Brazil and Angola.

In this critical reading of Nadine Gordimer’s July’s People, the study investigates how different power structures affect the points of view and identity processes of the novel’s main characters. S. Ahmed’s (2009) conception of “Whiteness,” as a means of orienting in the world, is discussed and used as an interpretive tool when reading July’s People. In particular, the ongoing and unfinished history of objects and bodies represented in the novel and how these relate to whiteness and the process of “othering” is explored. Furthermore, the privileged viewpoint or position attached to whiteness as a narrative orientation is related to thoughts on pedagogy. Moreover, it is stressed how in the construction of identity, language and dialogue are fundamental parts of a complex process. Finally, it is argued that the role of literature in this process is potentially emancipating.

The European Union expansion in 2004 has resulted in the most significant migration within Europe in recent years. While a contemporary understanding of multicultural Europe often emerges from politicians’ ideas on managing diversity, this thesis concentrates on a new understanding of multicultural societies which emerges from routine interaction between the recent arrivals and established individuals. These new patterns of interaction are a result of what Gilroy (2004) calls conviviality. While the literature on conviviality tends to focus on non-white ethnic minorities, my study fills the gap in research by concentrating on convivial experience of recent migrants coming from a predominantly white society to super-diverse cities. This research empirically explores how convivial culture emerges in encounters between Polish migrant women and the local population in Manchester and Barcelona, in the context of post-2004 migration. By applying a cross-cultural comparative and gendered approach to research on conviviality, the thesis focuses on Polish presence increasingly affecting multiple and complex relations situated in a specific time and place, and positioned by personal biographies. It develops the conceptualisation of conviviality by drawing on the historic and contemporary forms of convivencia in the Spanish and Latin American context. This allows an understanding of conviviality as a practical and dynamic process grounded in daily interactions. Furthermore, the conceptual framework is situated within the emerging field of geographies of encounters, and literature on race, racism and whiteness. It draws on the combination of methods, including participant observation, focus groups and narrative interviews conducted with Polish migrant women in Manchester and Barcelona. It stresses the importance of a person-centred approach through a use of cases. This contributes to a better understanding of everyday social relations between these women and the local population, including settled ethnic minorities and other migrants. The empirically explored narratives shed light on interaction in a myriad of quotidian situations in various spaces of the neighbourhoods, homes and in the workplaces. These encounters illustrate various forms of conviviality not necessarily free from tensions and classed, racialised and gendered perceptions of the Other.

This thesis extrapolates upon theoretical examinations of meat consumption as linked to masculinity in order to consider how meat consumption may also be connected to dominant themes in Canada’s national foundation as marked by whiteness, multiculturalism, and post-coloniality. I investigate two sets of advertisements – Maple Leaf Canada’s “Feeding the Country” commercial, and Alberta Beef Producer’s Raised Right online campaign – through employing multimodal critical discourse analysis and tenets of Stuart Hall’s theories of representations. In doing so, I argue that meat consumption is depicted in advertising as an ideologically and symbolically loaded practice that seizes upon and re-articulates greater themes of Canadian national identity in a way that denotes the nation as having overcome its racial tensions and colonial history.

This thesis examines contemporary popular and news media representation of motherhood and labour in Canada and the United States. I explore what texts about motherhood and maternal labour suggest about gendered responsibilities to citizenship in neoliberal conditions. Building on important feminist research in the fields of citizenship, care, and the welfare state, I ask how are mothers being socially responsibilized toward multiple forms of labour simultaneously and to what effect? By engaging feminist theories of citizenship and bridging this field with feminist theories of science, media, and affect, I demonstrate how, under neoliberal conditions and in precarious circumstances, the ways in which women appear to juggle their commitments to paid and unpaid labour, determines how mainstream discourses reflect their value as citizens. This dissertation uses feminist critical discourse analysis to assess how, as women are responsibilized toward unpaid intimate work in newly empirical ways at the same time that they are encouraged to pursue career success in full-time paid employment, contemporary women in Canada and the United States are encouraged to rise above welfare retrenchment and inadequate provision by juggling “it all.” My thesis is an intersectional feminist project that interrogates questions of gendered citizenship and maternal affect, and I join feminist political theorists in applying pressure to the field of citizenship studies to centre reproduction in discussion of gendered welfare.

The legal end of apartheid in South Africa brought about innumerable radical changes, not least so in its implications for the identity dynamics of all citizens. Due to their parents’ and grandparents’ undeniable involvement in and benefitting from the apartheid system, white Afrikaner youth are experiencing particular challenges as they battle to renegotiate their identity as Afrikaners. Three interrelated research aims guided this case study, namely a) to explore respondents’ attitudes toward a variety of identity labels and cultural elements; b) to detect possible manifestations of a present day ‘new’ Afrikaner nationalism amongst them and c) to probe the relationship between respondents’ identification and the South African ‘brain drain’. Literature and focus group data informed the content of a comprehensive survey, which was filled out by 151 respondents from the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Pretoria. Results illustrate that conventional Afrikaner churches and the institution of the family continue to act as a 'hub of socialisation' that transfers traditional values to the youth, in so doing providing continuity between the past and present. The two-thirds of respondents who are members of conventional Afrikaner churches are more likely to identify with exclusivist, conservative ethno-cultural values. The stark juxtaposition between a radically changed national context and these respondents’ values manifests in a particular strategy to present themselves as ‘politically correct’ citizens. This strategy involves utilisation of the notion of 'culture' to downplay the centrality of racial difference in their experiences and identification. They subscribe to several discourses that are typical of ‘whiteness’, which cast whites as victims of change and discredit post-1994 redress policies. It is argued that respondents’ strong ethno-cultural identification disproves the notion of an identity crisis amongst them and underpins the finding that few respondents plan to emigrate on a permanent basis. Their active consumption of key elements of white Afrikaner culture arguably constitutes a form of twenty-first century cultural nationalism. / Dissertation (MSocSci)--University of Pretoria, 2013. / Sociology / unrestricted

The resurgence of the discussion and practice of performance art in the past thirty years has moved towards the digital age and consequently has been met with a new dimension for exploration: YouTube. This paper investigates a possible reconfiguration of the notion of performance art through the digital archive of performances by South African rap-rave group, Die Antwoord. Utilizing the notions of risk, digital liveness (as posited by Phillip Auslander), and a conceptual dimension of ideas, a distinctive characterization of online performance art is posited. The video archive as conduit, a performative channel of expression, is considered as means of interactive meaning-making processes. This is accomplished by looking at Die Antwoord’s digital archive of YouTube videos and its confrontational content, as well as the responses in the comment section from the YouTube community in order to consider how the archive is reconfigured. / Dissertation (MA)--University of Pretoria, 2016. / Drama / Unrestricted

abstract: This dissertation examines pro-immigrants' rights activism and advocacy among middle-class White women in and around Phoenix, Arizona, in order to analyze these activists' understandings and enactments of their racialized and gendered citizenship. This project contributes a wealth of qualitative data regarding the operation of race, gender, class, (dis)ability, sexuality, and community in the daily lives and activism of White women pro-immigrants' rights advocates, collected largely through formal and informal interviewing in conjunction with in-depth participant observation. Using a feminist, intersectional analytical lens, and drawing upon critical race studies, Whiteness studies, and citizenship theory, this dissertation ultimately finds that White women face thornily difficult ethical questions about how to wield the rights entailed in their citizenship and their White privilege on behalf of marginalized Latinx non-citizens. This project ultimately argues that the material realities and racial consequences of being a White woman participating in (im)migrants’ rights work in the borderlands means living with the contradiction that one’s specific and intersectionally mediated status as a White woman citizen contributes to and further reifies the gendered system of White supremacy that functions to the direct detriment of the (im)migrants one seeks to assist, while simultaneously endowing one with the advantages and privileges of Whiteness, which together furnish the social capital necessary to challenge that same system of their behalf. The dissertation contends that White women committed to pro-(im)migrants’ rights advocacy and antiracism writ large must reckon with the source of their gendered and racialized citizenship and interrogate to what complicated and unforeseen ends they wield the Master’s tools against the Master’s house. In doing so, the project makes the case that White women's lives, as well as their experiences of citizenship and activism, are inherently and fundamentally intersectional and should be analyzed as such by scholars in Women's and Gender Studies. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Women and Gender Studies 2020

Masters of Art / This thesis explores the shifting racial identification and politics of the emerging Jewish community in Southern Africa between the Anglo-Boer War in 1902 and the Union of South Africa in 1910. Through an investigation of their actions and thoughts on the cultural, economic, linguistic and political aspects of their lives, I show how the emerging Jewish community formed itself through the political subjectivity of White settlers. Understanding how racial categories were being amalgamated and partitioned in that period of state formation, I argue that the mainstream Jewish community colluded with the colonial state to join into the ‘unity of the White races’. I use Memmi’s (1967 [1957], pp. 19,45) analytic distinction between ‘coloniser’ – a European on African land - and ‘colonialist’ – a coloniser who supports colonialism and believes in its legitimacy - to examine how the process of subject formation is articulated through the political economy of racial capitalism and settler colonialism. When Jews from Eastern Europe (Yidn) began arriving in South Africa in the 1880s, they faced a settler population which simultaneously treated them as members of an undifferentiated European settler population, as candidates for assimilation into colonial Whiteness, and as dirty subjects under threat of colonial state violence. Though there were other possible responses to the colonial relationship that Yidn could have taken, such as linking the fight against antisemitism with other anti-racist and anti-colonial struggles, the community went through a process of colonialist refashioning. To understand this transformation, I focus on four aspects of life. Culturally, Yidn were classed as dirty subjects and Jewish communal institutions worked with the state to ‘clean’, i.e. ‘Whiten’ them up. Economically, Jews of all class positions learnt the exploitative practices of settlers in racial capitalism. Linguistically, Yiddish became classified as a European language by utilising racial hierarchies. And politically, Yidn became citizens by embracing the ideology of a White-only franchise. Focussing in on these processes of assimilation into power, I argue that the primary Jewish communal institutions embraced and internally enforced a colonialist political subjectivity. This thesis is based on archival research conducted in three archives in Cape Town carried out between February and May 2019, and extensive reading of previous historical studies to write a new narrative from previously known sources.