Revisiting the ‘Black Peril,’ South Africa, circa 1912: Popular Culture, Group Identity, and New Ways of Knowing.

Abstract In 1912, in a grand public spectacle, the majority of the white population of the Witwatersrand mobilized against perceived “outrages” on women and children committed by African men in either a consensual or non-consensual manner: the “Black Peril.” As a case study, this paper focuses on select popular culture sources generated by this particular “scare” as its evidentiary base. It builds on prior historiographical appeals to affect and emotion in understanding “Black Peril” scares. The paper reexamines the “Black Peril” by attending, first, to its discursive output and therein to embodied, affective, or emotional, and automatic, or unconscious, “ways of knowing.” Second, it reads this discourse alongside non-discursive, unconscious, or automatic, baseline understandings of race and segregation from which the outbursts sprang. The paper tentatively suggests the possibility of a group identity that was not primarily constituted against, or through, fear and anxiety (of Africans). Instead, it was made in a self-referential and self-witnessing manner, and was self-assured, perhaps even imperious.