Abstract
This article offers an intersectional analysis of how non-elites frame neighborhood as a synecdoche for nation through tourism. In Cape Town, South Africa, white Western tourists perceive the peripheral Black townships to be more dangerous than the city’s white center but also more representative of the country and thus worth visiting. Drawing from ten months of ethnographic fieldwork, I illustrate how Black women who have established home-based township accommodations iron out the tension between tourists’ fear and desire. I employ Goffman’s theories of impression management to demonstrate how township hostesses make Black South African space fit for Western consumption through race, class, gender, and nation. On the frontstage, women assuage tourists’ inhibitions by acting as maternal African figures. On the backstage, they cover the risks borne of poverty as communal Black mothers. Their gendered production of Black place palliates post-apartheid problems and projects South Africa’s stability on the global stage, which invites further Western visitation and capital.
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01 April 2021
The original version of this paper was updated to present the correct in-text citation of Rivera 2011.
Notes
Under the apartheid system, “Black” could refer to anyone who was not white. Much as the term “people of color” currently operates in the United States, it was a rhetorical strategy that fostered antiracist solidarity. During my fieldwork, however, my South African participants used “Black” to refer to persons of African descent. This is also how I use it in the article.
I use the term “Western” to refer to persons arriving in South Africa from Australia, Canada, England, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, and the United States. Any effort to name a geopolitical bloc masks numerous distinctions among nations. I use this term not to minimize or conflate these differences, but to indicate tourists’ shared privileged location in the global economy.
“Colored” is an apartheid racial classification that grouped together persons with mixed descendance from indigenous groups, slaves from Southeast Asia, indentured servants from South Asia, and European colonizers. “Asian” includes primarily descendants of Indian indentured servants.
I am an American woman of East Asian descent, which sometimes elicited surprise or excitement from township residents who expected white overseas tourists. While I remained visibly distinct from whites, as indicated by frequent assumptions that I was from China, my status as a non-Black American student positioned me close to white Western tourists in terms of township residents’ expectations that I was relatively wealthy and unfamiliar with the African continent.
Even after I explained that my work would primarily be read by academics, most hostesses insisted that I was “really helping.” This may have been because my long stays brought in substantially more revenue than the average one night that white Westerners booked.
Kwaito is a genre of African house music that is popular among Black South African youth.
Peter Hain was a white Kenyan-born, South African-bred British politician who served in the British Parliament between 1991 and 2015 and as the Minister of State for Foreign & Commonwealth Affairs between 1999 and 2001.
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Acknowledgements
George Lipsitz, France Winddance Twine, and the participants of the 2018 University of Chicago Ethnography Incubator provided comments that benefited earlier drafts of this paper. Neil Gross, Fátima Suárez, three anonymous reviewers, and the journal editors helped tighten its analysis at later stages. The study participants’ generosity and patience made this work possible.
Funding
This research was supported by the University of California-Santa Barbara’s Center for Black Studies, Graduate Division, and Kline Fund for International Studies.
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Hikido, A. Making South Africa Safe: The Gendered Production of Black Place on the Global Stage. Qual Sociol 44, 293–312 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11133-021-09478-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11133-021-09478-z