The Black and White Rainbow

Series

• African Perspectives

Nation-building imperatives compel citizens to focus on what makes them similar and what binds them together, forgetting what makes them different. Democratic institution building, on the other hand, requires fostering opposition through conducting multiparty elections and encouraging debate. Leaders of democratic factions, like parties or interest groups, can consolidate their power by emphasizing difference. But when held in tension, these two impulses—toward remembering difference and forgetting it, between focusing on unity and encouraging division—are mutually constitutive of sustainable democracy.

​Based on ethnographic and interview-based fieldwork conducted in 2012–13, The Black and White Rainbow: Reconciliation, Opposition, and Nation-Building in Democratic South Africa explores various themes of nation- and democracy-building, including the emotional and banal content of symbols of the post-apartheid state, the ways that gender and race condition nascent nationalism, the public performance of nationalism and other group-based identities, integration and sharing of space, language diversity, and the role of democratic functioning including party politics and modes of opposition. Each of these thematic chapters aims to explicate a feature of the multifaceted nature of identity-building, and link the South African case to broader literatures on both nationalism and democracy.

Carolyn Holmes is Assistant Professor of Political Science and Public Administration at Mississippi State University. Her research has appeared in African Affairs, Acta Politica, Commonwealth & Comparative Politics, Democratization, and the Journal of Southern African Studies. She has conducted extensive field research in South Africa, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Fulbright-Hays Program, and she has frequently contributed to the Monkey Cage column published by the Washington Post.
 

Praise / Awards

• "The Black and White Rainbow: Reconciliation, Opposition, and Nation-Building in Democratic South Africa is a fascinating interrogation of nation-building in South Africa, and what this means for the country and for the citizens within it as they continue to struggle to live together in a democratic state. At the very center of this struggle is the question of identity, which itself is not a new concept, but is the focus of so much research and analysis in many different countries."
  
  -Lilly J. Goren, New Books Network
• "In many ways, according to Holmes, South Africa is no closer to forging a fully functioning nation than it was in the 1990s. This pessimistic conclusion comes from open-ended, carefully constructed interviews that Holmes conducted in 2012–13 with voting-age Afrikaners in Bloemfontein and Zulu in Durban. ...The result is a well-crafted, provocative contribution to research on political development and mixed societies like South Africa."
  -CHOICE