Political identity and social change: The remaking of the South African social order

Adopting the perspective of a social constructivist theory of political identity, the dissertation explores variations in the structure and power of South African identities during the transformation of the apartheid social order. It begins by establishing the importance of identity in the process by which agents and structures constitute both each other and order in society. It argues that the transformation of social structures is negotiated by the members of a society through their interactions, and that these interactions are organized and managed through the identity labels that participants and observers use to describe and explain those involved. Identity labels, therefore, constitute a valuable key to understanding structures of and changes to social power. Within this theoretical context, the South African transition is laid out using a series of chronologically progressive case studies and an ethnographic analysis of the identities evoked in their discourses. The dissertation analyzes texts from the discourses surrounding three of the social and political conflicts that made up the transformation of the South African social order---the 1976 student uprising, the debate over constitutional reforms in 1983--4 and crime in contemporary society. These conflicts represent sites of negotiation where South African have gone about dismantling apartheid and constructing an alternative social order. This dissertation is an attempt to understand how South Africans have used identity labels to organize and make sense of each of these conflicts and to find patterns in how the power of the labels has changed over time. It therefore studies how identity labels function as discursive social structures, how social activity is organized through these structures and how both the labels and their power have changed during the course of South Africa's transition. In this way, the dissertation contributes to the study of recent and contemporary South African society and provides lessons about the relationship between identity and social change more generally.