ABSTRACT
In the autumn of 2006, the South African Institute of Race Relations (SAIRR) reported that the white population of South Africa had shrunk by over 16 percent between 1995 and 2005; that is, in the post-apartheid era (SAIRR 2006). More recent data indicate that roughly half of all South Africans living overseas are in the UK, and that those living in the UK have the most interest in and are the most likely to return to South Africa. Keeping this mass migration in mind (though by no means one-directional), in this article I bring into conversations current debates within literatures on geographies of race and geographies of transnational mobility using the case of white South African migration. This article examines mobilities—the mobile practices of the white, English-speaking South Africans from KwaZulu-Natal. Beginning with a critique of approaches to the study of race that privilege discourse and a brief review of materialist approaches to understanding whiteness, I move on to discuss the visa regimes that facilitate access of white South Africans to the UK and Europe, and then I draw on interview data to argue that whiteness can be understood as a material racial formation through its contingent coconstitution, at a variety of scales, with mobilities both past and present, or what I call the “visa whiteness machine.”
