Interracial Publics

Negotiating Race, Intimacy, and Belonging in Postapartheid Public Culture

Dados Bibliográficos

ID24144192
AutoresSebastian Jackson (0009-0005-7578-2523, autor correspondente)
Ano2026
Páginas000-000
Data de publicação2026-09-11
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoCurrent Anthropology (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 0011-3204 • E-ISSN: 1537-5382
EditoraUniversity of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1086/742629
OpenAlexW7212266386
IdiomaEN
Referências citadas35

This article examines the formation of “interracial publics” in postapartheid South Africa, showing how race, intimacy, and belonging are negotiated through mediated encounters. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, and media analysis, it traces how relationships between people historically classified as “white” and “nonwhite” become publicly visible and collectively interpreted across print, broadcast, and digital platforms. These publics are ambivalent and contested: they can normalize formerly forbidden intimacies and foster cross-racial connection, yet they also reinscribe racialized hierarchies through gendered and sexualized discourse. Situating these dynamics within South Africa’s longer histories of settler colonialism and apartheid, the article argues that the regulation of intimacy has been central to projects of racial governance and white supremacy and continues to animate their afterlives in contemporary struggles over visibility, belonging, and desire. Interracial intimacy functions as both a measure and a mediator of contemporary racial formations, contributing to comparative anthropological debates on race, media, affect, and the public sphere in postcolonial societies.

Ambivalence · Colonialism · Ethnography · Public sphere · Publics · Race (biology) · White (mutation) · White supremacy · Asian American and Pacific Histories · Caribbean history, culture, and politics · Race, History, and American Society