ABSTRACT
This chapter undertakes a dual task. It argues for a historical approach to social psychology which can appreciate how layers of historical change are reflected in contemporary constructions of groups and group relationships. It also proposes that attempts to move beyond a binary approach to group relations (the ‘two-group paradigm’) and to study more complex configurations of group relationships, risk reproducing the arbitrariness of the two-group approach if they continue to treat these groups in an ahistorical manner. This case is elaborated through a critical analysis of anti-immigrant discourse that is current in democratic South Africa, in which third parties are regularly invoked. In this discourse, African and Asian immigrants are construed as a third party of non-citizens who are interfering detrimentally in more longstanding race and class relations among South Africans. But this can be challenged in a number of ways: by interrogating how it obscures the regular victimization of immigrants; by unpacking the historical origins of the current taken-for-granted distinction between citizens and non-citizens, which only emerged in the transition from apartheid; and by considering alternative configurations of intergroup allegiance and division invoked by political movements with an anti-xenophobic agenda. Thus, even constructions of three-way group relationships should not be taken for granted, but placed in their historical and political context.
