Intimacies, Authenticities, and Postcolonial Imaginaries in South African Township Hospitality

• In Event: 4445 - Culture and Service Work: Relationships, Identities, Inequalities

Abstract

This paper theorizes the link between intimate service labor, the construction of authenticity, and the production of national imaginaries through an examination of South African township tourism. Since South Africa's 1994 democratic transition, black townships have become popular "cultural" attractions that invite tourists to experience post-apartheid multiculturalism. I focus on township accommodations, a sector driven by black women who invite guests into their modest homes. Drawing from fourteen months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted over a four-year period, I show how these hostesses perform intimate labors to produce distinct forms of "authenticity" for white Western tourists, black South African tourists, and black South African locals. Guests' consumption of these authentic experiences challenge or fortify their impression of the "real" post-apartheid South Africa. Thus, by engendering guests' feelings of intimacy and perceptions of authenticity, women's hosting labors generate differentiated representations of the post-apartheid state. These fragmented projections in turn reveal how segregation along lines of race, class, and nation enable conflicting interpretations of globalizing South Africa to coexist.

Author

• Annie Hikido, Colby College