Fear and alienation: narratives of crime and race in post-apartheid South Africa

Abstract

This article focuses on interpretations and representations of violent crime in fiction, non-fiction and media to explore racialised discourses of fear and vulnerability in contemporary South Africa. It is less concerned with statistics and “facts” related to crime than with the role of race in impressions of and attitudes towards criminal violence. And, whereas gender, class and nationality all mediate the ways in which crime is experienced and perceived by residents of South Africa, for a considerable portion of the white population race remains the predominant factor when it comes to fear of violent crime. Perhaps the most significant difference in black narratives is that black South Africans do not conceptualise violent crime in terms of a racial assault. For a country struggling to overcome its corrosive racial history, crime discourses that emphasise blacks as perpetrators and whites as victims both reflect and shape the ongoing reconciliation process.