Christi Louise Kruger

This project aims to critically understand post-apartheid citizenship through the concept of “poor whiteism”. Building on, and drawing from my doctoral thesis, I will complete a monograph manuscript that focusses on a group of poorer white South Africans who have settled, informally and illegally, in a former caravan park on the West Rand of Johannesburg. The book will explore the socio-economic genealogies of the poorer white residents of the park, the everyday practices of making livelihoods, and attempt to reproduce ideologies of South African whiteness in a spatiality — the “squatter camp” — that has historically been associated with blackness. The project aims to understand how these particular ideologies have influenced both understandings of contemporary whiteness and it shapes the conservative white political imaginary.