Overview

White workers occupied a unique social position in apartheid-era South Africa. Shielded from black labour competition in exchange for support for the white minority regime, their race-based status effectively concealed their class-based vulnerability. Centred on this entanglement of race and class, Privileged Precariat examines how South Africa's white workers experienced the dismantling of the racial state and the establishment of black majority rule. Starting from the 1970s, it shows how apartheid reforms constituted the withdrawal of state support for working-class whiteness, sending workers in search of new ways to safeguard their interests in a rapidly changing world. Danelle van Zyl-Hermann tracks the shifting strategies of the blue-collar Mineworkers' Union, culminating in its reinvention, by the 2010s, as the Solidarity Movement, a social movement appealing to cultural nationalism. Integrating unique historical and ethnographic evidence with global debates, Privileged Precariat offers a chronological and interpretative rethinking of South Africa's recent past and contributes new insights from the Global South to debates on race and class in the era of neoliberalism.

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9781108927208

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Reviews

'An important contribution to both historical and social science scholarship on South Africa, this account of white labour politics, with particular emphasis on Afrikaners [traces the trajectory of white trade unions from the militantly anti-capitalist but racially exclusivist battles of the early 20th Century, through an ambiguously privileged situation under apartheid, to recent attempts to adjust to majority rule. The book shows that white society was never fully unitary, but always reflected class divisions. This outstanding work combines innovative archival scholarship with the author's remarkable field-work study on the Solidarity movement of recent years.' Jonathan Hyslop, Colgate University and University of Pretoria 'Meticulously-researched and rigorously analytical, this is an extremely rich, perceptive and sensitive study of a neglected strand in the history of modern South African society - white workers. Vivid and instructive, as a clear-eyed exploration of how white labour dealt with its ambiguity in a country riven by race and class, there really is nothing quite like it in the field. This story of mixed human fortunes is summed up perfectly by its deliciously snappy title'. Bill Nasson, University of Stellenbosch 'An insightful and original historical analysis of the multi-layered politics and subjectivities of white workers from the early 20th century into the democratic era. Its examination of the MWU's evolution from a racially-exclusive union to its reinvention as Solidarity persuasively asserts that the late 1970s was the crucial moment of crisis for white workers' relationship with the apartheid state. Importantly, the book lays bare Solidarity's contemporary project, inspired by the Zionist Histadrut, to create a 'state-in-state' particularly in the interests of white Afrikaans-speakers.' Noor Nieftagodien, University of the Witwatersrand 'Working intersections between race and class, past and present, and archival research and remarkable oral interviews, Privileged Precariat helps to mark the emergence of southern Africa as a leading site for the study of whiteness. An elegantly written and closely argued demonstration of the role of the state in racial formation.' David Roediger, University of Kansas 'Van Zyl-Hermann fills a major gap in the literature … She draws compelling parallels with the economic fate of white American workers and the rise of Donald Trump, underlining the contemporary salience of this well-written, well-sourced book …' Peter Limb, The Journal of Interdisciplinary History

Author Information

Danelle van Zyl-Hermann is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of History at the University of Basel, Switzerland, and a Research Associate with the International Studies Group at the University of the Free State, South Africa. Her research on the entanglement of race and class, and the politics of whiteness in Africa has been published in various international journals. She is the co-editor of Rethinking White Societies in Southern Africa, 1930s–1990s (2020), a regional history of poor and working-class whites during colonialism and white minority rule.

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