Die Son Sien Alles : The Constitution of Community in a Post-Apartheid Tabloid

[摘要] ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This study considers a Cape Town based tabloid, Die Son, and how it has become a platform on which a particular community negotiates its boundaries and constitutes itself as shared identity. By approaching the tabloid as facilitating an identification with a larger collective in moral, political and legal terms, I show that the tabloid helps to enable the imagining of this working class, coloured community. Unlike in Anderson's case (1983), the tabloid works here against the nation as abstract form, with its promises of inclusion for all. Instead, it relies upon a process of negation, producing boundaries around the community it purports to represent. Such boundaries, I propose, are established by figures out of place, through which the tabloid produces limits of the community, not only displaying but also channeling public antagonism. I register these figure types – the abject criminal, the wolf in blue, the African foreign national – through different kinds of affective speech: disgust, fear, and hatred. By considering how affect gives form to particular group expressions, I understand Die Son and its readership as an intimate counterpublic that demands that people guard themselves against the presence of forces that threaten to undo community boundaries, thereby constituting belonging negatively. I further consider how the tabloid produces an image of itself as a counterparent, a figure which coincides with a development of attachment and identification. However, to fully exclude these figures out of place proves impossible and undoes the promise of Die Son that it will see everything [Son Sien Alles]. These figures continue to haunt the community, circulating in the tabloid and ensuring that, ironically, this intimate counterpublic persists as a promise of a secure community beyond the nation.

[发布机构] Stellenbosch University