Making Race and Nation

"This is such an interesting book for understanding the related phenomena of state-building and identity. It helps us to see South Africa, and perhaps Africa in general, in a broader context. It makes the point that state power is very much connected to how identities and national identities get configured and how those relationships can be found in conflicts in the way in which Half of a Yellow Sun depicts with respect to the Nigerian Civil War. South Africa, Brazil and the United States were, for centuries, extremely diverse societies, a mix of people from many parts of the world. These three were most notably racially diverse in the sense of white populations and black African populations with histories of slavery. Marx asks why you get highly exclusionary, racist regimes like Jim Crow in the United States and apartheid in South Africa, but something very different and much more integrationist in the case of Brazil. He argues that it had to do with the different ways in which their founding conflicts got resolved. There was the American Civil War and there was the Boer War in South Africa. One was between North and South and one between the British and the Afrikaners. In both cases, it was primarily white groups that fought with one another. One important way in which they solved those conflicts was to heal up the nation’s wounds by unifying around whiteness and excluding blacks from full citizenship, as a type of compromise to get past those bitter conflicts. “Virtually all of Africa was subjected to colonial rule” But in Brazil, there was no such conflict or war among white people. Certainly, there are still important legacies of slavery and inequality in that country that persist to this day. In some ways, there has been much more politicization around race in recent decades but most people would agree that for most of the twentieth century, the salience of race and identity politics were much more profound in the United States and South Africa relative to Brazil. The larger message for state-building in Africa and more generally is that it is often tied to conflict and the forging of particular national identities. This was published in 1998 so it was early on in the post-apartheid regime. What he highlights with respect to the anti-apartheid struggle is that the resolution of one conflict is not fixed. By creating this exclusionary state in both the United States and South Africa, that propelled civil rights movements and challenges in both countries, helping to drive legislation in the 1960s in the United States and the ending of apartheid in South Africa by the early 1990s. Those kinds of national categories ended up becoming racialized categories and the basis for struggle and, to revisit the core theme we’re talking about here, became very central to the machinations of democratic politics in those countries."