Untying the Ties That Bind Her: Re-Negotiating Personal and Collective Ideologies of Gendered Whiteness in Fin-De-Siècle and Post-Apartheid South Africa

In this chapter I explore how the ‘immigrant’ experiences of two white female protagonists - the historical figure of Bertha Marks, who immigrated to South Africa from Sheffield in 1886, and myself, as post-colonial persona living in post-apartheid South Africa - are performed in the series of photographic work, Ties that Bind Her, exhibited on my art exhibition titled Dis-Location/Re-Location. Themes explored in the work and the chapter include the difficulties inherent in, and processes of, adaptation and transformation, through the psychological discarding and preserving culturally ingrained attitudes, behaviours and values. I touch on Bertha Marks’s attempts to preserve her white, Anglo-Saxon colonial Jewish heritage that is based on the colonial tropes of hierachisation and separateness. I thereafter propose correlations between my ambivalent position as a white, English speaking, second-generation Jewish female living in a postcolonial, post-apartheid South Africa and debates within South African whiteness studies around what Melissa Steyn identifies as a sense of ‘psychological dislocation’ that certain white South Africans are currently experiencing.1 Steyn argues that since South Africa’s first democratic election in 1994, underpinnings of white identity have been challenged through processes of redress; anchors which previously held whiteness secure are shifting or have been removed, resulting in a sense of displacement for those white, English-speaking South Africans who staked much of their identity on their privileged whiteness.2 Bertha Marks’s experiences of dislocation and alienation are considered in parallel with my experiences of displacement from a society caught in the throes of reconstruction and redress. The two personae’s experiences are considered as manifestations of the immigrant’s need to re-locate within ‘her’ new environment, entailing re-evaluations of personal and collective ideologies of gendered whiteness.