Analysis Of Larry Grubbs s Workshop Of A Continent ...

Larry Grubbs s â€Å" Workshop of a Continent : American Representations of Whiteness and Modernity in 1960s South Africa† is aptly named given the material he discusses. Grubbs argues that when American observers discussed South Africa s modernity, the signs and symptoms of a modern country they looked for were actually symptoms of whiteness. He argued that whiteness and modernity were conflated by western observers, who he believed defined modernity as being similar to the United States.1 These observers were unable to explicitly state that whiteness was why they supported South Africa due to the pressures of the Cold War, and after the American Civil Rights movement during the 1960s American observers consistently condemned the apartheid system in South Africa.2 Even while condemning apartheid, official United States foreign policy and public opinion tacitly condoned its existence in order to maintain South Africa as a stabilizing element in Africa that would further US in terests for most of the Cold War. Grubbs first sought to establish a definition of whiteness and modernity, which he argued were both â€Å"imagined categories.†3 He argued that consumption was the primary vehicle where the concepts of whiteness and modernity had become conflated by American observers. According to Grubbs, consumerism, modernity, and whiteness were presumed to be universal and normative by the 1960s.4 American observers believed that consumption was an expression of a modern society, and