24 Jan – 31 Jan 2015
Cape Town
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A first principle for WWW research!
Whites Writing Whiteness is neither an epistemological project concerned primarily with matters of knowledge, nor an epistolary one concerned specifically with letter-writing as a medium of communication.
It is instead centrally engaged with matters of representation, with how people see and represent the world and other people in it, and as a consequence it works across the epistemological/ontological so-called divide, for in practice questions of being and questions of knowing overlay each other. Gottlob Schreiner, a London Missionary Society missionary who arrived in South Africa in the 1830s, wrote letters in which he struggled to know what the different communities he was living among were ‘like’ in ethical and spiritual terms; he also, somewhat pig-headedly, struggled to be the kind of preacher working under the hand of God he wanted to be, and saw this as requiring him to know God’s being in its fundament. Impossible here to separate out being and not/knowing. In the 1910s and 20s, South African politician and Prime Minister Jan Smuts wrote hundreds of letters to a woman friend in which in which he inscribed an epistolary space which had no ‘race’ aspects because none of the people (i.e. black) who for him bore its markers were present/represented; the economy of land and mines and factories ran themselves, meals cooked themselves and houses cleaned themselves, clothes were washed and ironed and children were looked after by themselves… The world Smuts represented in these letters was one made ontologically safe – separation, apartheid, was made as though absolute.
In both examples, albeit in very different ways, at different times and for different reasons, in these representational spaces inscribed by Gottlob Schreiner and by Jan Smuts questions of being and questions of knowing were both foreground and background and also inseparable.
This is one of the first principles of the Whites Writing Whiteness project research. For an extended discussion of this and other WWW first principles’, please go to: http://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/project-overview/first-principles/
Last updated: 3 February 2015
