The article explores the emotional regimes of settler colonialism in post‐apartheid South Africa. The focus is on apocalyptic fears of the imagined eradication of whiteness. These fears are articulated in response to postcolonial/decolonial interpellations of abject whiteness, and are made visible in a range of sensational signs that circulate online and offline. The signs cluster around two themes that are central to the ideologies of settler colonialism: land (and its feared loss), and (white) bodies (and their feared disappearance). Following Sarah Ahmed (2004a,b), emotionally charged signs can be seen as actions (akin to words in speech act theory). In contrast to Jürgen Habermas’ conception of the public sphere as an idealized place of rational debate, the article argues that a combination of affect‐emotion‐feeling and the performance of ‘reason’—what Aristotelian rhetoric refers to as pathos and ethos—are integral for understanding public‐political discourses of whiteness at a time when white privilege has been called out globally (and locally), and white dominance has lost its stronghold.

中文翻译：

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耸人听闻的迹象，权威和公共领域：变迁中的定居者殖民言论

本文探讨了种族隔离之后的南非定居者的殖民情绪。重点在于人们对想象中的消除白色的世界末日的恐惧。这些恐惧是由于对殖民地/非殖民地对白度的干扰而表达的，并在一系列在网上和线下流传的轰动迹象中可见。这些标志围绕着两个关于定居者殖民主义思想的核心主题：土地（及其担心的损失）和（白人）尸体（及其担心的消失）。继莎拉·艾哈迈德（Sarah Ahmed，2004a，b）之后，充满情感的迹象可以看作是行动（类似于言语行为理论中的词语）。与于尔根·哈贝马斯（JürgenHabermas）将公共领域视为理性辩论的理想场所相比，在全球（和地方）要求白人特权，而白人支配地位已经丧失据点之时，悲情和精神是理解白人的公共政治话语所不可或缺的。