Output details

Performing White South African Identity through International and Empire Exhibitions

This chapter in ‘Approaches to Global Design History’. London: Routledge. pp. 77-82, a peer reviewed publication, provided an important contribution to this international anthology on globalising design history. It offers a specific geographical case study of South Africa, under represented in design histories and exhibition histories. It explores this site in the context of a global empire and finally draws on interdisciplinary theoretical approaches.

The chapter presents a focus on early twentieth century South Africa as a particular site of the imperial exhibitionary complex, and argues for such imperial and national events to be understood as performative. Building on work on performativity in queer theory, cultural geography and cultural studies, it challenges established historiographies of exhibitions as ‘representations of identity’ and rather recommends, and successfully deploys, theoretical concepts of reiterative performativity as ways to understand the assertion of racialised national identity through imagined imperial space and material national place.

This research was informed not only by theoretical concerns about identity, but also by the methodological experience of archival excavations to re-trace, re-imagine and re-write such ephemeral events.

The chapter developed from an invited paper for the symposium Approaches to Global Design History, an AHRC-funded Network on Global Arts (2009).