The role of place and metaphor in racial exclusion: South Africa's beachesas sites of shifting racialization

This article examines the rhetoric of racial exclusion as applied to South Africa's beaches between 1982 and 1995, a period during which beach aparthe id was progressively dismantled. Using a sample of 400 newspaper articles a s textual evidence, we demonstrate how racist rhetoric during this period e xploited ideological constructions of space and place. We focus on a set of arguments that constructed beaches as the legitimate preserve of the (whit e) family and black beach-goers as a threat to this place image. The shift from the old to the new South Africa provides a historical lens through whi ch we view the variable deployment of this familiar rhetoric of transgressi on and exclusion. Whereas in the 1980s, black political protest was portray ed as disrupting the 'fun-in-the-sun' essence of beaches, in the 1990s a ne o-separatist discourse of manners predominated. References to beaches as fa mily places were used multiply and variably to justify racial exclusion and segregation.