Efecto del tabaco a nivel de la respuesta del huésped

The majority of my participants expressed a desire to leave Intaba, even if only temporarily, which reflects the potential struggles that young people may encounter when invited into ‘improving narratives’ of enhancing the life experiences of their parents (Skeggs, 1997:82). Such narratives, which in this case may require students to feel the need to move to a city or take on particular religious beliefs, form part of a vision for a better life that contains within it an implicit critique of the lives they currently live, including the people and places closest to them. In her study of working-class women's struggles to become 'respectable', Skeggs (1997:82) writes that ‘working-class was

configured through the improvement discourse because in order to develop they have to differentiate themselves from those who did not or could not improve.’

Walkerdine calls for a more complicated understanding of upward mobility and ‘the terrifying invitation to belong in a new place, which is simultaneously an invitation to feel shame about what one had been before’ (2003:238). Her work suggests that invitations into normative (urban, middle-class and in the case of South Africa, historically white) visions of success are produced, in part, through affectively orienting the subject away from the location that precedes such mobility.

Although researching in a different context, Walkerdine (2003) highlights the tensions at the heart of mobility narratives, which assign a negative value to people and practices that are central to one's identity. For example, within my research this is echoed in the experiences of Lionel, who expressed a sense of shame regarding his grandparents’ traditional practices and rural lifestyle, a lifestyle he did not aspire towards. It also speaks to the experiences of Sihle, among others, who felt he had to do better than his father, who had worked as a manual labourer all his life, and Petal, who expressed her need to go to university in order not to become a domestic worker like her mother and sisters.

Space and gender are significant in enabling this ‘improvement discourse.’ Not only are my participants envisioning futures that were denied to their parents during apartheid, they are envisioning their futures in spaces that their parents were not permitted to occupy. As noted by Ahmed, spaces acquire the ‘skin’ of the bodies that inhabit them (2007). Universities within South Africa, particularly the historically whites-only universities, are spaces which have been oriented around some bodies, rather than others. While these spaces may now be ‘multiracial’ and open to all, whiteness remains in ways that might be invisible and unmarked, but is ‘the absent centre against which others appear only as deviants, or points of deviation’ (Frankenberg, 1993). The effect of this ‘around whiteness’ is the institutionalisation of a certain ‘likeness’, which makes non-white bodies feel uncomfortable, exposed, visible, different, when they take up this space (Ahmed, 2007:157). Simphiwe and Zinhle’s aversion to study at historically white institutions, mentioned earlier in this chapter, expresses their discomfort.

The ‘whiteness’ I speak of is not reducible to white skin and non-white bodies do now inhabit historically white spaces, in South Africa and elsewhere. Whiteness is rather what the institution is orientated ‘around,’ so that even bodies that might not appear white still have to inhabit whiteness, if they are to get ‘in’ (Ahmed, 2007:158). What is recited is a very style of embodiment, a way of inhabiting space, which claims space by the accumulation of gestures of ‘sinking’ into that space (Ahmed, 2007:159). Simphiwe’s ultimate desire to be comfortable in entering ‘white’ spaces and

live the life of the ‘upper’ level displays her awareness of the need to accrue a ‘style of embodiment,’

and accumulate the kind of capital(s) required in order for her to successfully navigate this unfamiliar social field, and in so doing, subvert her own position in social space.

While Simphiwe did not use the term ‘class’ at any point, her desire to move from a ‘lower’ to an

‘upper’ level demonstrates her recognition of herself as being positioned with a lowly status. There are parallels between my participants’ comments and concerns regarding their social position and studies on class and social advancement in other contexts. Within the UK, Walkerdine has explored how young women negotiate the shift from working-class to middle-class selfhood. Reflecting on the experiences of one such woman, she writes:

‘What I want to think about is the way in which Lisa understands her o ld childhood subjectivity as a working-class girl in a council house and how she understands and fantasises her new subjectivity. I want to argue that she imagines remaking herself and this demands a complete negation of her Other self. She then engages in powerful and pleasurable fantasies about the kind of woman she wants to become. Held inside these fantasies, though, is a painful Other, that which she fears that she is and wants not to be’ (2003:245).

Behind the future visions articulated by Simphiwe, as well as other young people in this study, there may exist a rarely expressed and ‘painful Other.’ While not solely manifesting along racial lines, this ‘other’ is marked by place, race and gender. The longer I spent within my fieldsite, the more my participants expressed a conflicting fear and desire to enter what has been historically marked as ‘white spaces.’ An example of this can be found in the rare times when students were afforded the opportunity to visit the closest cinema and shopping complex to Intaba – located in the formerly white provincial capital, Nelspruit, an hour’s drive away. Lionel told me that he felt white people did not want to get close to him, and would walk on the other side of the mall in order to avoid him and his friends. He said that this happened all the time and that they were used to it. Rather than these experiences giving him a negative view of white people, however, he desired more interaction with them. For this reason he wished to attend the University of Stellenbosch, a historically Afrikaans institution located on the other side of the country and which has received substantial negative press for racism.

In my last interview with Pertunia, she similarly relayed to me her experiences of racism. The previous weekend, she had visited the same mall with a friend, and had been standing in a queue behind a white woman and her baby. She told me that she started making cooing noises to the baby and the mother had stared at her angrily and put the baby away in her pram. Pertunia expressed how sad this made her feel, like she was ‘nothing’ (interview). On the same afternoon she relayed this incident to me, she wanted to know when next we could visit Gleneagles, a formerly

whites-only town where she might be met with the same discrimination that had caused her pain at the shopping mall. The pain associated with contact in the context of racism brings to mind once again the work of Fanon (1967). While I was struck by the resilience of my participants in desiring to continually return to spaces where they considered themselves not to be welcome, young black South African’s everyday opportunities are constrained by the requirement for them to negotiate and adapt to dominant spaces of whiteness. Therefore, giving up on inter-racial interactions may not be regarded as an option if young black South Africans wanted to improve their social standing.

Numerous scenarios, similar to the two referenced above, were relayed to me by students, and were often followed by a comment regarding how happy they were to get to know me, a white person who wanted to spend time with them. The majority of other interactions they had with non-black people centred around interactions with the employers of family members – many of whom worked as cleaners or gardeners for white people living in nearby towns. All the white people they had interactions with were in superior positions to them, fuelling the perception that white people were ‘cleverer’ than black people. This reflects the manner by which, in post-apartheid South Africa, the formal power of white supremacy has been abolished, but the normative ideological power of whiteness lives on. While the demise of apartheid has led to many situations in which South Africans come into closer contact with one another, contact occurs within a context of unequal power relations in which ‘whiteness’ continues to be privileged over ‘blackness’. Racialised patterns of reasoning continue to exist, often unnoticed and unchallenged. The limited exposure and contact time that the students had with people helped fuel these perceptions.

Differences and distinctions between ‘people like us’ and ‘people not like us’ can evoke intense affects of disgust and contempt, provoking extreme emotions of shame and humiliation among the dominated and those made abject (Tyler, 2008 in Wetherell, 2012:110). Yet while Lionel and Pertunia expressed feeling rejected by white people, this did not prevent them both from wanting to navigate white places. Instead of feeling forced back into established practices or remaining in predominantly black areas where he felt more comfortable, Lionel expressed an even stronger desire to spend time in white areas. Affect may at times cause us to repeat ‘old scenes’ (as is the case of Zinhle and Simphiwe), and other times, it may bring about change and jolt us into a ‘new scene,’ as is evident with Lionel (Wetherell, 2012:107).

6.6 Conclusion

This chapter has analysed the contradictory, ambivalent and multiple relationships that young South Africans have with regards to the ‘urban’ and ‘rural.’ It probed the different meanings they attach to places and argued that these meanings are rooted within a history of racialised spaces.

In this chapter, I have explored how feelings of belonging are a crucial dimension of inclusion and exclusion, as belonging involves a relationship to place, with bearing upon racial, religious and gendered identities. I have shown that while many young South Africans desire to engage with the economic and cultural capitals associated with cities, these desires often require them to navigate multiple, contradictory spaces and occupy changing, hybrid identities which encompass a desire to return to rural spaces. In attempting to capture the shifting attachments that structure how young South Africans living in rural Mpumalanga construct their future narratives, this chapter argues for the importance of space in the formation of subjectivities.

My participants conveyed a dominant association between the ‘rural’ and what they called their

‘traditional’ culture, in opposition to an ‘urban’ life, which corresponded with modernity and opportunities available in post-apartheid South Africa. Yet while the majority of my participants expressed a desire to leave rural spaces and engage with the promises of the city, this was not a straightforward aspiration, given the immense sense of belonging, which most of my participants retained, to where they had come from. This sense of belonging not only encompassed relations to people they care about, but also represented connections to the past, to tradition and to ‘culture.’

The contrast between students’ backgrounds and the ideas about success to circulate within the LO classroom and, on occasion, the wider community of Intaba, generated ‘a habitus divided against itself, both deeply ambivalent and consigned to successive allegiances and multiple identities’ (Reay, 2007:1198). The poststructural framing of this project allows me to see these multiple subjectivities as inevitable. While this chapter has demonstrated the persistence of race and class in dictating who belongs and who is excluded from certain spaces, the embodied ways that affect informs our subjectivities will be taken up further within my next Chapter.