University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations 2015 Empire Unbound - Imperial Citizenship, Race and Diaspora in the Making of South Africa Khwezi Mkhize University of Pennsylvania,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations Part of the African American Studies Commons, African Languages and Societies Commons, and the African Studies Commons Recommended Citation Mkhize, Khwezi, "Empire Unbound - Imperial Citizenship, Race and Diaspora in the Making of South Africa" (2015). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 1096. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/1096 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/1096 For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Empire Unbound - Imperial Citizenship, Race and Diaspora in the Making of South Africa Abstract "Empire Unbound" is an exploration of the history and politics of empire and imperial citizenship that went into the making of South Africa before the Second World War. The making of racial difference in South Africa is often located in the temporal and political terrain that is Apartheid (1948-1994). In this dissertation I look to the history of South Africa in the long nineteenth century and recuperate the frameworks of empire and imperial citizenship in making sense of struggles for belonging. Empire, both as a form of government and imaginary, invokes a degree of scale that exceeds the nation-state. It also historically precedes the nation-state, which has come to exemplify the model form for organizing sovereign polities. In "Empire Unbound" I argue that as South Africa became a self governing territory in the early twentieth century it folded the remnants of empire into its instrumentalities of racial governance.