South African Families of Indian Descent
Transmission of Racial Identity
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 2999401 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Kathryn Pillay (0000-0002-5977-2764, University of KwaZulu-Natal, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2015 |
| Volume | 46 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 121-135 |
| Publication date | 2015-03-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of Comparative Family Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0047-2328 • E-ISSN: 1929-9850 |
| Publisher | University of Toronto Press Inc. (UTPress) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.3138/jcfs.46.1.121 |
| OpenAlex | W2607016972 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
| References cited | 9 |
This article examines how notions of 'race' are constructed and transmitted across generations within South African families of Indian descent. The qualitative data analysed and presented in this paper was collected by means of oral histories and semi-structured interviews with five South African families of Indian descent, and has been drawn from a larger data set that was gathered for my doctoral research. I argue in this paper that the continued focus of the democratic South African state on apartheid-era 'race' classification in various legislative and bureaucratic guises has resulted in the embeddedness of 'race' thinking in the national psyche. This has set limits to identity choices, and the family, therefore, while being an important site of racial identity formation, is superseded in significance by relationships with varying role players in society, including, and most important in this case, the South African state. The born-free and raised-free generation's uncritical acceptance of the racial label 'Indian' does not conflict with the older generations understanding and appropriation of the category. This further points to the cogency of apartheid legislation in a democratic country, and while agency cannot be denied, this paper argues that agency has to be viewed relative to the constraints imposed by society. This paper demonstrates that rejection of the 'race' label by participants or resistance to it, is futile, as legally and socially South Africans of Indian descent are marked as 'Indian' by virtue of their phenotype and thus remain trapped by state imposed classifications
Agency (philosophy) · Democracy · Embeddedness · Identity (music) · Political science · Politics · Race (biology) · Social science · Sociology · State (computer science) · African cultural and philosophical studies · Gender Studies · Law · Multilingual Education and Policy · South African History and Culture
| Unique citing works | 2 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,4 |
| Citation span | 2021 - 2025 (5) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 2 |