1 Right as rain
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Scott Burnett
Abstract
Like far-right groups around the world, white supremacists in South Africa have reinvented themselves in response to technological, cultural and political change. This chapter situates the South African ‘far right’ in a loose confederation of individual and organisational actors committed to a shifting set of racist, ethnonationalist, anti-democratic and separatist ideas, embodied in the figure of the successful actor, singer and right-wing agitator Steve Hofmeyr. Hofmeyr is a key cultural figure for Afrikaans-speaking white South Africans who has historically aligned himself both with the far-right three-armed swastika of the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging and the white-and-blue droplet of Suidlanders, as well as more mainstream organisations such as AfriForum. Through close multimodal analysis of the music video of the hugely successful 2019 song ‘Die Land’ (Afrikaans; the land/country) recorded by Hofmeyr with four other singers, this chapter shows how an evolving visual rhetoric for right-wing thinking in South Africa attaches to agricultural landscapes, mobilising sensational signs to create a sense of shared Afrikaner identity grounded both in present victimisation and in hope for the future. It is this hope for future enclaves of ethnonational purity that the chapter argues makes sense of some of the changes in visual style and vocabulary.
Abstract
Like far-right groups around the world, white supremacists in South Africa have reinvented themselves in response to technological, cultural and political change. This chapter situates the South African ‘far right’ in a loose confederation of individual and organisational actors committed to a shifting set of racist, ethnonationalist, anti-democratic and separatist ideas, embodied in the figure of the successful actor, singer and right-wing agitator Steve Hofmeyr. Hofmeyr is a key cultural figure for Afrikaans-speaking white South Africans who has historically aligned himself both with the far-right three-armed swastika of the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging and the white-and-blue droplet of Suidlanders, as well as more mainstream organisations such as AfriForum. Through close multimodal analysis of the music video of the hugely successful 2019 song ‘Die Land’ (Afrikaans; the land/country) recorded by Hofmeyr with four other singers, this chapter shows how an evolving visual rhetoric for right-wing thinking in South Africa attaches to agricultural landscapes, mobilising sensational signs to create a sense of shared Afrikaner identity grounded both in present victimisation and in hope for the future. It is this hope for future enclaves of ethnonational purity that the chapter argues makes sense of some of the changes in visual style and vocabulary.
Chapters in this book
- Front Matter i
- Contents v
- Figures vii
- Tables x
- Contributors xi
- Acknowledgements xv
- Studying the far right’s natural environments 1
- 1 Right as rain 24
- 2 The exclusivist claims of Pacific ecofascists 43
- 3 The National Socialist Movement of the United States and the turn to environmentalism 63
- 4 The environmental semiotics of Spanish far-right populism 83
- 5 Purity and control 104
- 6 The new Russian civilisation 125
- 7 Not so green after all 146
- 8 From metapolitics to electoral communication 166
- 9 The murky world of ideologies 186
- 10 Homeland, cows and climate change 206
- 11 Double vision 229
- 12 Talking heads and contrarian graphs 253
- 13 The (paranoid) style of American climate politics 274
- Looking back, looking forward 294
- Index 302
Chapters in this book
- Front Matter i
- Contents v
- Figures vii
- Tables x
- Contributors xi
- Acknowledgements xv
- Studying the far right’s natural environments 1
- 1 Right as rain 24
- 2 The exclusivist claims of Pacific ecofascists 43
- 3 The National Socialist Movement of the United States and the turn to environmentalism 63
- 4 The environmental semiotics of Spanish far-right populism 83
- 5 Purity and control 104
- 6 The new Russian civilisation 125
- 7 Not so green after all 146
- 8 From metapolitics to electoral communication 166
- 9 The murky world of ideologies 186
- 10 Homeland, cows and climate change 206
- 11 Double vision 229
- 12 Talking heads and contrarian graphs 253
- 13 The (paranoid) style of American climate politics 274
- Looking back, looking forward 294
- Index 302
