Brothers from another mother: Seeing the uncanny in US popular media depictions of South Africa

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Abstract

This article examines a pattern of popular US audiovisual media depictions of post-apartheid South Africa, which portray SA as harbouring latent danger. I use these depictions as an entry point into a broader web of articulation that connects various theoretical lenses (including Othering and theories of fear), empirical data, and historical context in order to tell a conjunctural story about the precarity of US exceptionalism and Whiteness. Rather than reading these depictions as a suggestion that SA is a tangible threat of danger to the world, I argue that the strategic formation of these depictions reveals how the US experiences the uncanny (familiar unfamiliar) in SA, another significantly White settler-colonial state, and thus perceives a discursive threat of SA democracy to US exceptionalism on the global stage. This conjuncture, I suggest, reveals a discursive struggle over multicultural global futures and who gets to define democracy in the popular imagination.

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APA

van der Merwe, R. L. (2022). Brothers from another mother: Seeing the uncanny in US popular media depictions of South Africa. International Journal of Cultural Studies, 25(5), 589–605. https://doi.org/10.1177/13678779221090986

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