From West Street to Dr Pixley kaSeme Street:1 How contemporary racialised subjectivities are (re)p roduced in the city of Durban This thesis is part of the larger mission to understand and challenge the ongoing reproduction of race. The focus of this particular project is on how race is perpetuated through the continuing construction of our racialised subjectivities in/through place. This idea is broadly epitomised by the idea that „who we are is where we are? (Dixon and Durrheim, 2000) and the recognition that this process is highly racialised. This emphasis locates this project squarely within the social psychology of race, place and identity. To collect data that could facilitate access to racialised place-identity constructions I used a mobile methodology wherein black and white city government officials (who had grown up in Durban) took me on a walking and/or driving tour of the city of Durban talking with me about the racial transformation of this city from our childhood (in apartheid times) to the present (post-apartheid) city. These conversations were digitally recorded and transcribed for analysis. I also recorded various activities that took place during the tour and made extensive pre-tour and post-tour notes. All of this material was utilised analytically. Initially I analysed the discursive practices which we (the participants) engaged in as we constructed the racialised city historically and contemporaneously and reflected on the attendant subjectivities of blackness and whiteness invoked by this particular place-identity talk. When it became apparent that there was more to the production of race on the tours than that which was produced by our implaced talk my analysis progressed to an examination of other practices which produced race on the tours, namely, our material/embodied interactive practices. Through paying close analytic attention to our interaction on the tours it became evident that key practices which produced race on the tours – the spatial, discursive and embodied practices – were inextricably connected to each other in a „trialectical? (tri-constitutional) relationship. I argue that we need to analyse this trialectical relationship further because of the ways in which it facilitates the creation of racial sticking points which obfuscate racial transformation in South Africa.

Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2009.