Paradoxical Splits: Race and Journalists' Identity in Post-apartheid South Africa

Since the new democracy, journalists in South Africa have been faced with a particularly subjecting call from the ruling party, the African National Congress: a call to be loyal, conflating this in the process with the liberation project of the past. This article examines how black journalists reacted to this call, and what sort of turns' they made in the aftermath of a luncheon organised by the Forum for Black Journalists in 2008, from which their fellow white colleagues were excluded. By examining the journalists' discourse and the demise of the FBJ, this article concludes that race is not the master signifier in journalism and through journalism. In some instances, there were erratic signs of passionate attachments to signifiers that oppress, for instance, apartheid and colonial norms. The method is conceptual and theoretical. The article deploys concepts developed by Judith Butler (such as passionate attachments, unhappy consciousness, and resignifications) and Slavoj Zizek's deployment of signifiers (that of master- and floating-signifiers) and applies these to race and journalism in post-apartheid South Africa.