The Politics of New African Marriage in Segregationist South Africa

Citation:

Healy-Clancy, Meghan. “The Politics of New African Marriage in Segregationist South Africa.” African Studies Review 57, no. 2 (2014): 7-28.

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.

Publisher's Version

Last updated on 08/19/2014