AFRIKANER IDENTITY, dysfunction and grief

237pp., paperback, Pietermaritzburg, 2018

"A compelling and elegant exposition on an ethnic whiteness and its attempts to rehabilitate itself after ceding its ignominious command of an oppressive state system. Vanderhaeghen demonstrates how the deft use of poststructuralist theoretical insights can expose the power effects of the news media's meaning-making processes. Scholars of race, ethnicity and neoliberal capitalism will find this work illuminating." Christi van der Westhuizen, Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Pretoria, and author of "Sitting Pretty: white Afrikaans women in postapartheid South Africa"

"Central to the book’s original contribution is the notion of “self-othering”, namely the discursive switch present in Afrikaans media that turns perpetrators into victims in an attempt to dislodge the historical burden of collective guilt and assume a new identity of marginalisation – thereby activating a discourse of minority rights and the need for cultural protection. This is a significant, authentic insight that the author goes on to support through empirical analysis of newspaper reports." Herman Wasserman, Professor of Media Studies and Director of the Centre for Film and Media Studies, University of Cape Town

"At a time when South Africans are struggling with questions of identity and belonging, Vanderhaeghen grapples with, among other things, his own prejudice, with racism, with ideological conflict, with whiteness, with what it means to be African and with what might be meant by an "Afrikaner" identity. Dilemmas of politics, representation and meaning making animate this book. A complex and subtle portrait of identity-in-the-making and the role that the media play as cultural entrepreneurs in the construction and demarcation of the boundaries and currencies of imagined communities." Louise Vincent, Professor of Political and International Studies, Rhodes University

Journalist Yves Vanderhaeghen wrote his PhD on Afrikaner 'self-othering' in the Beeld newspaper. Currently he is editor of the Witness newspaper in Pietermaritzburg.