Home and national belonging : narratives of Zimbabwean middle class women in Cape Town

• Main Author: Hadebe , Rutendo
• Other Authors: Scanlon, Helen
• Format: Dissertation
• Language: English
• Published: University of Cape Town 2015
• Subjects: Social Anthropology
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/11427/13317

Includes bibliographical references. === This research is an analysis of narratives collected from Zimbabwean black middle class women residing in the South Africa’s coastal city of Cape Town. The narratives construct and locate participants in the main South Africa xenophobia immigration discourse. The research attempts to answer the question: How do mainstream discourses of migration shape Zimbabwean Black middle class migrant women’s narratives of home and belonging in Cape Town? The women participants in this research self-identify as middle class and have lived in Cape Town for years ranging from three to 22. The women produced subjective knowledges around key themes of otherness, representations of belonging, identity formation and gender roles in new spaces, all which aim at aligning and enriching the main dominant discourses around Zimbabwean women immigrants and their experiences of exclusion and belonging. The women’s narratives provide an opportunity for a more nuanced understanding and analysis of the migration phenomenon. The research simultaneously engages in power analysis along key inequality contours of gender, race, ethnicity and class and ascertains their transformation or reinforcement within the discourses. The findings of this research resonate with post-modern notions of knowledge which frame it as fragmented, locked in individuality and discursive, while being oppositional to knowledge anchored in objective positivism. This research therefore celebrates alternative ways of framing which are accommodative and willing to give voice to fragmented, gendered, subjective and emotive agency of women. The women participants are viewed as active participants in migration processes and in this particular case, as provider of new insights into counter grand migration and xenophobia discourses.