White anxiety in (post)apartheid South Africa

Abstract

Robin DiAngelo’s influential concept of white fragility, while certainly suggestive and critically useful, does not go far enough in accounting for three central aspects of white anxiety as it occurs in the (post-)apartheid South African context. Utilizing Lacanian psychoanalytic theory to sketch a rudimentary paradigm of anxiety, and focusing on textual examples drawn from (post-)apartheid popular culture – including the work of Rian Malan and Neil Blomkamp’s 2009 film District 9 – this paper opens up a series of distinct perspectives on (post-)apartheid whiteness. Departing from the construct of white fragility – which is less destabilizing, less dynamic, and less attentive to the dimension of fantasy than is the notion of white anxiety – it offers instead a Lacanian psychoanalytic conceptualization of white anxiety. One implication of such a reading is that, beneath the racist defensiveness of post-apartheid whiteness, an ambiguous mode of unconscious identification racial otherness might indeed be at play.