Whites writing whiteness: letters, domestic figurations and representations of whiteness in South Africa 1770s-1970s

Lead Research Organisation: University of Edinburgh
Department Name: Sch of Social and Political Science

Abstract

South African society and its changes over time is of particular social science interest, as a crucible for exploring the mechanisms of social change, including what became its distinctive overlapping hierarchies of racialed, gendered & classed inequalities, organised around segregation and institutionalised apartheid. Latterly, its democratic transition has been a model for social transformation. Focusing just on the recent period, however, glosses a constant process of more fragmentary changes: away from 'high' politics, ordinary people of all skin colours and language groups have lived out its racial formations in different ways over time. The 'Whites Writing Whiteness' project captures this through investigating 'whites writing' and 'writing whiteness' in letter-writing and correspondences from the 1770s to the 1970s, a crucial period in its history. This attention to epistolary exchanges gives focus onto the small white population and through this addresses the representation of whiteness as a social category and the related creation of racialised hierarchies within what over time became a highly racialised social system. A strong case exists for researching and using letter-writing as an appropriate and effective source for investigating social change: it is a relational activity which brings together affective and material aspects of social life, it is highly responsive to changing social mores and conventions, and consequently it provides a lens on the changing ways in which white people lived, perceived and represented whiteness (and by implication blackness too) to each other over this momentous time period.

How and why did social change in South Africa take the form it did? In what ways was this experienced, from the early colonial period, through imperialist intervention, to the 1948 National Party election victory and apartheid, and the 1970s & the winds of change? What resistances and accommodations occurred in different areas of the country, and from individuals and networks of different political, economic and religious standing? How did people represent such changes over time in their letters, correspondences and other 'documents of life'? The proposed research will investigate and theorise changing representations of whiteness in the context of social, economic and political change from the 1770s to the 1970s so as to address and answer these important research questions regarding racialisation.

The research base is provided by detailed investigations of c25-30 family collections which span at least three and up to six generations between the 1770s & the 1970s (when the last letters were written) and case studies of a sub-set of c12. The collections and archives are located across South Africa, contain very large numbers of personal and family letters and correspondences and in some cases diaries, reflective notebooks and other auto/biographical writings, and with marked changes in family fortunes occurring for these families over time. The data will be managed using an online Virtual Research Environment (VRE) developed for a preceding ESRC project.

The Fellowship proposal provides a cohesive programme of work which encompasses the investigation of letters and correspondences from the 1770s to the 1970s focusing on white families of the 'middling sort', and also draws together ideas, insights and data from across my researches in South Africa to theorise whiteness and its creation of racialised categories, hierarchies and social practices. It enables a research base built up through successfully completed projects since 1994 to be taken forward in a substantial and innovative new direction.

Planned Impact

The two types of impact which the 'Whites Writing Whiteness' Fellowship proposal is likely to generate are:

(a) Academic: Through enhancing the international knowledge economy and promoting conceptual, theoretical and methodological innovations and advancement, including the utilisation of new and innovative methodologies and techniques supported by the use of a leading-edge VRE developed in a prior ESRC project.

(b) Economic and Societal: The likely impact type here can best be summarised by rephrasing one of the ESRC's strategic priorities, as 'through increasing understanding of collective and societal behaviour and change'.

The main beneficiary groups and the potentials for such impacts regarding them are as follows:

Academic: The potential for impacts here is generated by the Fellowship programme advancing new knowledge and ways of thinking about the origins, development of and challenges to whiteness and other racialised categories and hierarchies and also regarding the South African past and the complex lived experiences of its peoples; generating a major new dataset available for secondary analysis; publishing leading-edge research in international journals; and directing Fellowship activities towards South African and UK postgraduate, postdoctoral and early career researchers as well as existing experts in the field.

Archives and Museum Sector: The potential for impacts here is generated by the Fellowship programme of research being carried out in major South African archives and museums; through its database making available useful supporting aids for collections conservation activities; promoting the importance of South African archival holdings and encouraging further use by other researchers; and thereby helping enhance the connection of sector staff with the international research community.

Documentary-Makers in the Media: The potential for impacts here is generated by the Fellowship programme demonstrating the appeal and interest of 'stories' within archive collections concerned with important aspects of the South African historical past; supporting media researchers reworking and 'translating' this in programme-making; and acting as consultant to quality documentary initiatives.

General Public - Family History and Genealogy: The potential for impacts here is generated by the Fellowship programme making available high-end fully searchable family collections research data through hriOnline; supporting this with a portfolio of quality interpretive editorial materials; and including within this detailed genealogical materials connecting the families in question with their European origins and also locating them among their wider South African interconnections.

General Public - Life Writings and Auto/Biography: The potential for impacts here is generated by the Fellowship programme focusing on lives and lived as well as represented experience; directing attention to the activities of individuals as well as networks; and ensuring quality popular data 'to the person' is part of output, in particular regarding the in-depth case study data, which will substantially include autobiographical writings as well as epistolary ones.

The project Advisory Group will involve people drawn from all five beneficiary groups and is key to impact activities. It will 'meet' virtually via Skype every six months (and face-to-face in sub-sets) and provide guidance and advice on impact pathways and also help set markers regarding impact events. For detail on types of impact activity and impact pathways, see 'Pathways to Impact'.
 
Description Project research questions in the ESRC application have all been addressed and answered and the key aim of the project achieved; all objectives contributing to this have been fulfilled, some more fully than others because of structural circumstances addressed in the following section.
1. WWW has investigated the letter-writing of a range of white South Africans over a 200 year time-period, its findings showing that changes in the racial order have occurred in piecemeal ways, connected with the activities of different networks of people, in different areas, expressing sometimes very different responses from each other. The structural level has been important in political and policy respects, but with sometimes significant dislocations between this and the concerns and expressive terminologies of exchanges between interconnected letter-writers.
2. Letters are a particularly porous 'document of life' and so a good litmus-paper for registering developments in the representational order. Important changes in the racialising aspects of letters are among WWW findings, pointing to distinctive patterns arising around South Africa's economy and the communicative technologies prevailing in different time-periods. These patterns include ethnicity and race being marked or excluded by some people and networks but not others, with the letter-writing concerned largely involving practical instrumental exchanges of a 'doing the business of the fabric of social life' kind, in staying in touch and expediting shared activity. The closer letter-writing is to quotidian concerns, the more it registers different ethnic/racial groups and individuals; the more it focuses on meta-concerns of family relationships or official life, the more there is prevailing silence about the racial order.
3. Affect and interiority are seen as key concerns of letters by migrants in other colonial contexts, not practical quotidian matters. WWW research has shown that this arises from focusing on specific groups and individuals, at a smaller scale, in particular time-periods, while the large size and more extensive temporal coverage provided by WWW data substantiates its finding of a more rounded set of letter-writing practices. These include using resonant terms and phrases now viewed as offensively racist, with such practices being tracked systematically across WWW letters. This shows nearly all such terms had 'innocent' beginnings and later accrued racial then racist connotations and meanings over time. Use of such terms is not always axiomatically pejorative, but needs to be related to the time-period, network of people, contexts of usage, and the practices of particular letter-writers.
4. Tracing long-term changes in letter-writing concerning race matters has required developing innovative methodological strategies and techniques, to enable general patterns to be traced over time, and also individual and network-related usages to be included in the analyses made. The different collections researched have been recorded as separate databases that can be analysed individually, and also combined, within WWW's purpose-designed Virtual Research Environment (VRE), which additionally supports working in-depth on individual documents and also across them in building iterative analyses. Maintaining both figure and ground in a Qualitative Longitudinal Research approach is analytically crucial, has underpinned the trajectory of project publications, and is also important in promoting wide secondary analysis of WWW's dataset, both as a whole and of specific elements.

See also below point 2.
Exploitation Route Supporst for users to take the research forward including in secondary data-analysis have been built-in. The existing website features both primary data and interpretive materials, provides research support with reading lists, analytical case-studies and methodological toolkits, and is extensively used. Usage is tracked with detailed analytics, with new provisions developed around user interests.

These provisions will be extended when the full dataset is published by HRIOnline in April 2017 (and fully maintained for a seven year period minimum thereafter). Collections databases will be fully searchable and advanced research tools provided, with secondary analysis supported on individual collections; on subsets of letter-writers, time-periods and geographical areas; and across the entire dataset.

A large regular user community has been established, with the Lives and Letters maillist's c600 members, regular research seminars, and a three-site international conference series, forwarding its conceptual, theoretical and methodological aims. Invited plenary addresses by the PI in the museum and libraries, modernist editing, digital scholarship and critical whiteness contexts have further forwarded interdisciplinary engagements with project work. Publications have been targeted regarding these different research communities, including at the interface between academic and wider public groups. These initiatives will be extended post-data publication by HRIOnline, through promoting WWW's range of facilities using web-based sources and also running a series of 'open days' both in South Africa and the UK which will provide detailed information about the range of research activities that can be supported through the WWW dataset and its analysis.
Sectors Digital/Communication/Information Technologies (including Software),Education,Government, Democracy and Justice,Culture, Heritage, Museums and Collections,Other
URL http://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk
 
Description A detailed Narrative Impact report is available and can be accessed on the WWW website at http://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/files/2017/11/WWW-Overview-Impact-Report-Nov2012-Oct2017.pdf. The main focuses for impact identified in the WWW funding application are as follows, with a brief summary of what has been achieved: (a) Academic: Through enhancing its 'international knowledge economy' aspects and promoting 'conceptual, theoretical and methodological innovations' and knowledge advancement, project outputs have advanced new knowledge and innovative ways of thinking about the origins, developments of and challenges to whiteness and other racialised categories and hierarchies regarding the South African past and the complex lived experiences of its peoples. It has generated a major new dataset available for in-depth secondary analysis, supported by an extensive suite of research and analysis tools and an extensive editorial apparatus. It has published leading-edge research in a variety of international journals and also two monographs, and achieved a higher level of outputs than specified in the funding application. In addition, a tranche of Fellowship activities has focused on South African and UK postgraduate, postdoctoral and early career researchers, including through three seminar series (two UK, one South Africa) organised under the aegis of the WWW project. (b) Economic and Societal: Impact here has been concerned with 'increasing understanding of collective and societal behaviour and change'. A number of beneficiary groups and associated potentials for impacts were identified as a focus of project activities, as follows. • i. Archives and Museum Sector: WWW archival research has been carried out in major South African archives and museums in the state system, in local archives, and in collections held in its outstanding university archives and manuscripts departments. It has also promoted the importance of these collections and encouraged further use by researchers and thereby helped promote the connection of sector staff with the international research community. It has also contributed to conservation aspects, for example by providing inventories where these did not previously exist. There has also been a close relationship between the project and archive and museum specialists in the UK, through presenting papers at appropriate conferences and also targeting some publications to members of this community. In this connection, a jointly authored monograph - The Archive Project: Archival Research in the Social Sciences - involved the Professorial Fellow as the senior author and this was read and commented on in draft and as reviewers by senior members of the archives and museum specialism. • Ii. Documentary-Makers & Media Journalism: There has been significant interest from documentary makers and journalists, although as noted take-up has proved difficult to track, given current developments in electronic media and that people have engaged with and used materials on the WWW website without necessarily making face-to-face or email-to-email contact. This has made demonstrating specific impact difficult, for the kind of direct contacts that occurred regarding the prior ESRC-funded Olive Schreiner letters project have been overtaken by communications developments. • Iii. General Public: Research is by no means the preserve of academics, and contacts from users indicate a wide usage of the WWW website and its research materials, with the majority being of a 'popular' general public kind. • iii (a) General Public - Family History and Genealogy: Impacts here have been facilitated by making available quality research materials and research data via the WWW website, supporting this with a substantial and frequently added to portfolio of editorial materials. In response to feedback and usage analytics, this has included providing detailed information about family and other relationships so as to locate the letter-writers and their addressees among their wider South African interconnections, supporting a wider range of secondary analysis of project data. The purpose has been to facilitate and enhance secondary analysis by a wide range of international users. A large number of contacts have been made by people researching either their own family history or genealogical research more widely, as the WWW data provides a great deal of in-depth information not available in other sources. This provision will be significantly extended when the full data-set and accompanying editorial apparatus and research tools and visualisations become available in January 2018 via the new HRI Digital website, with its 'back end' currently being finalised. A set of launch activities is planned and an upsurge in usage is anticipated following this. • iii (b) General Public - Life Writings and Auto/Biography: Life writings of all kinds are magnets for popular interest. Relatedly, the growth of membership of the Lives & Letters mail-list is also reflected in the fact that its regular monthly issues are widely distributed via other mail lists, while an associated interest in the individual letter-writers whose collections have been included in WWW research has been demonstrated through contacts made by users seeking more information. Both the Lives & Letters mail-list and the interest of users regarding particular letter-writers have been supported by targeting the content of mailings, and especially by providing detailed information on collections and key letter-writers and their addressees in a recently introduced "Collections' section of the website, again with the intention of supporting enhanced secondary research activity of a variety of kinds. All the identified areas of impact have been engaged with and impact results achieved, although as already noted, media contacts have changed character because of communications developments. As part of these developments, the WWW website rapidly became central to promoting and enhancing the reach and significance of its research and in developing its impact activity. The analytics built into the website design have enabled usage developments and changes in this to be closely tracked and aspects of impact to be pinned down, over time, regarding the locations of users, and in respect of page and research preferences. The following sections of this report concern developments in use of the website, and what the analytics information tells regarding reach and significance of the research and its impacts. 3. The WWW Website: Development & Analytics The WWW project website, hosted at the University of Edinburgh, was created immediately before the funding period commenced and launched on 30 November 2012. It has achieved a high-level of both 'popular' and academic research use, both of which have continued to increase over time and as new research provisions have been introduced. Following the end of the funding period, further analytic content has continued to be regularly and consistently posted and users have continued to use the website, indeed at an increased level which continues such increases to the point of writing. The Edinburgh site is scheduled to be joined by a new WWW research website, hosted by HRI Digital at the University of Sheffield, in January 2018: http://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.org. This will feature an enhanced suite of research facilities and tools to support a high level of in-depth secondary analysis of the full WWW dataset. This will in particular include a full set of tools for users to generate their own data visualisations. It will be accompanied by further publication of research findings from the WWW research. The research dataset is a large and complicated one and provision of a full suite of research tools Is essential for user access to support wide secondary analysis. While website use and the impact of the project's research are not coterminous, nonetheless given the strong research-based character of the WWW website, there is clearly a close and important relationship between them. The analytics of website use discussed later show the reach and significance of the project's research materials, providing robust evidence of take-up, and showing that the locus of user interest is in the more research-focused parts of the website. The analytics also show the strongly international impact of the research and that it is being taken up and used by diverse communities world-wind, in carrying out their own academic and also 'popular' secondary research of a range of kinds. What has been already posted is an extensive editorial apparatus in respect of theoretical, methodological and substantive matters, together with some pages/sections which feature examples of analysis and interpretation, together with the retrievable data these are concerned with (the Traces and Curiosities are indicative). In addition, the full dataset is about to be published on the HRI Digital research website with enhanced search and visualisation tools to support full-scale secondary analysis. The existing Edinburgh site has had over 10,000 users including a large group of more than 2,000 people who regularly spend significant time using the materials provided, and it is anticipated that because of this there will be a 'ready-made' large user group for the full dataset, which can then be grown. Regular reports on use of the WWW website, tracked using Google Analytics, have been produced every six months over the project life-time and have been circulated to Advisory Group members and through the Lives & Letters mail-list; these are archived on the website (http://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/thehub/google-analytics/). This overviewing report now considers information about the WWW website and the use and impact of its research provision over the full time it has been online to date. Using Google Analytics to track usage has enabled drilling down into many of the specifics of page preferences and time spent by users working in different locations. This has been followed up on by using these to provide users with enhanced provision in areas of demonstrable interest and concern. The WWW website has been designed and provisioned to facilitate research use and secondary data analysis, with its use in these ways being an important aspect of the impact of project research. In addition to the specifics of how users engage with the website. Detailed information is provided in the Report on the WWW website.
First Year Of Impact 2013
Sector Digital/Communication/Information Technologies (including Software),Education,Leisure Activities, including Sports, Recreation and Tourism,Government, Democracy and Justice,Culture, Heritage, Museums and Collections,Other
Impact Types Cultural,Societal
 
Description Public audiences
Geographic Reach Multiple continents/international 
Policy Influence Type Implementation circular/rapid advice/letter to e.g. Ministry of Health
URL http://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk
 
Title VRE and QLR methodologies 
Description Key contributions to innovative research tools and methodologies as well as to conceptual and theoretical matters have been made, in line with project objectives. 1. WWW has pioneered development and use of a project-designed Virtual Research Environment, a sophisticated project-specific suite of research tools. This has been written at my direction with tools transcending those available in off the peg CAQDAS software, enabling analysis of its very large dataset focusing on its longitudinal characteristics, diversity of included sources and rich individual records. VRE facilities have also been used to develop the user interface for the published dataset at HRIOnline, thereby ensuring that public users have access to the same range of advanced research tools. 2. WWW research has operationalised an innovative Qualitative Longitudinal Research methodological approach which combines analysis of the entire extremely large WWW database (of over 47,000 records) with identifying and reading specific documents in close analytical detail. This approach has transcended the assumption of big/quantitative and small/qualitative and relatedly combined quantitative with qualitative work within its QLR approach. It enables its 'figure and ground' analytical concerns to both be retained, and treated as interconnected in the analyses carried out. (See also 'Research databases'.) 
Type Of Material Improvements to research infrastructure 
Year Produced 2016 
Provided To Others? Yes  
Impact The VRE is now available for customisation by HRIOnline for other projects. The QLR approach is detailed in a number of publications to date and interpretive essays on the project website, and it is central to the monograph arising from project work. 
 
Title WWW dataset @ HRIOnline 
Description Nearly 30 major archive collections of letters and connected papers have been worked on in detail in WWW research, producing linked databases concerning more than 47,000 letters. Information regarding these records is provided in the fully searchable dataset being published from the research by HRIOnline at the University of Sheffield (in April 2017), which will be fully maintained for a minimum seven year period thereafter. The records are being published with a suite of advanced research tools to support secondary analysis, both by academic researchers, and by users from across the public sphere. It will be the largest and most far-reaching data resource for long-term historical research on different aspects of South African society, and also regarding changes occurring with respect to race and ethnicity more widely. (See 'Research tools'.) 
Type Of Material Database/Collection of data 
Year Produced 2017 
Provided To Others? Yes  
Impact The publication date is April 2017. The domain name and URL are: Whites Writing Whiteness at http://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.org and the site is hosted and fully maintained by HRIOnline. 
URL http://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.org
 
Description Website and public engagement activities 
Form Of Engagement Activity Engagement focused website, blog or social media channel
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach International
Primary Audience Other audiences
Results and Impact User engagement has been promoted including by providing a WWW website maintained and contributed to on a regular weekly basis. This has featured primary data as well as interpretational and theoretical essays, methodological support for carrying out archival projects, and discussions of critical whiteness and issues involved in whiteness research. Usage has been tracked in detail by collecting non-intrusive analytics, enabling the provision of facilities to follow user interest, as gauged by numbers of users, of visits, and amounts of time spent on particular pages.

There have been over 13,000 separate visitors to the website 2013-2016, a high proportion being multiple repeat visitors from over 100 countries including the UK, USA, South Africa, Australia, Canada, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, Bulgaria, India and Kenya. Web-searches on terms including whiteness, race, letters and particular named individuals produce WWW pages in the top group of hits. While the majority of new site traffic comes via Google etc, now a third of traffic and rising is from Facebook rather than academic sources. There is a core group of 946 multiply-returning users at present. Topics dealt with in the Traces discussions of primary data and in the weekly project Blog frequently give direct rise to related inquiries. The number of visits and usages of pages has increased month on month and traffic continues rising, with a major boost expected when the full research database is published by HRIOnline in April and available for searching and using.

Facilities for user engagement via the website have been complemented by running popular as well as academic events. In South Africa this has included week-long Summer School courses for members of the public on critically using web sources for South African research, held at the Universities of Cape Town and Pretoria, and similar one-day Summer School events at Rhodes and the University of the Free State, as well as appearances in a number of radio programmes and press interviews. 'Open day' events promoting practical uses of project research will occur over the next year. (See also 'Influence').

Impact in the form of take-up of various kinds has occurred as demonstrated by increasing requests for information and advice and also by more general contacts in which people provide information on how they are using material from project.

A major increase in all these activities Is anticipated once the project dataset is published by HRIOnline, as this will give users access to the complete dataset of more than 47,000 letters and a suite of advanced research tools that will support a range of detailed enquiries using these materials. The dataset with much research support material will be published by HRIOnline at http://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.org
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2013,2014,2015,2016,2017
URL http://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk