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The Politics of New African Marriage in Segregationist South Africa

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 August 2014

Meghan Healy-Clancy
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Abstract:

For the mission-educated men and women known as “New Africans” in segregationist South Africa, the pleasures and challenges of courtship and marriage were not only experienced privately. New Africans also broadcast marital narratives as political discourses of race-making and nation-building. Through close readings of neglected press sources and memoirs, this article examines this political interpolation of private life in public culture. Women’s writing about the politics of marriage provides a lens onto theorizations of their personal and political ideals in the 1930s and 1940s, a period in which the role of women in nationalist public culture has generally been dismissed as marginal by scholars.

Résumé:

Pour les hommes et les femmes éduqués dans les missions appelés “nouveaux” Africains dans une Afrique du Sud ségrégationniste, les plaisirs et les défis de se faire la cour et du mariage ne sont pas seulement des expériences personnelles. Les “nouveaux” Africains ont aussi publié leurs récits conjugaux comme des discours politiques sur les races et la consolidation de la nation. Grâce à des lectures attentives d’articles journalistiques et de mémoires négligés, cet article examine cette injection politique de la vie privée dans la culture publique. L'écriture des femmes sur la politique du mariage mettent en lumière les théorisations de leurs idéaux personnels et politiques dans les années 1930 et 1940, une période où le rôle des femmes dans la culture publique nationaliste africain a généralement été rejeté comme marginal par les chercheurs.

Keywords

GendermarriageraceethnicitynationalismSouth Africa
Type
ASR FORUM: THE POLITICS OF MARRIAGE IN SOUTH AFRICA
Information
African Studies Review , Volume 57 , Issue 2 , September 2014 , pp. 7 - 28
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 2014 

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