Paper short abstract:

Based on primary research carried out in Johannesburg and Pretoria during the 150th Year ceremonies commemorating the arrival of the first Indian indentured labourers to South Africa, the paper is concerned with the ways in which collective self-commemorations of belonging contributed to the articulation of a South African Indian identity torn between Pretoria’s efforts to accommodate difference and construct an inclusive, non-sectarian national identity and the desire to perform and institute difference.

Paper long abstract:

In post-apartheid South Africa the image of the rainbow nation where multiple but essentialised racial identities (white, black and Indian) mingle yet remain distinctive has become dominant. But has the acquisition of a full-fledged citizenship by all its ethnic and racial groups led inevitably to the strengthening of attachments to the nation-state at the expenses of the erosion of other subnational, ethnic, racial or cultural identities as the modernist adagio widely assumes [Young 1998:3]? Or has social change instead produced stronger communal identities?

The paper intends to capture the increasing efforts of South African Indians (the world's largest non-immigrant Indian population outside India with unusual little focus towards its homeland) to articulate their subjectivity as a key, but partially disadvantaged, minority group in post-Apartheid South Africa by analysing the significance of the commemorations organised by a wide range of South African Indian associations and local governments to celebrate the 150 years of the arrival of the first Indian indentured labourers to South Africa. Building on the idea that identities are in a constant state of becoming [Kertzer 1988], and aiming to uncover possible relations of power and hierarchies between the over-arching vision of the rainbow nation and the Indian communal identity thus articulated, this work draws on the established notion of the constructedness of collective identities and on the ontological power of performance [Butler 1999] for the understanding of rituals of commemoration and articulations of notions of collective subjectivity.