Abstract
D.Litt. et Phil. (Fundamental Communication Theories)
Despite romantic attachments being a pervasive and a universally shared pursuit it is
surprising that there remain many unanswered questions about love and romance in
Africa. The situation is even more complex in South Africa given the history and legacy
of apartheid which made societal division along racial lines a norm, limiting intimate
relations between the racial groupings. When we study interracial communication from
the vantage point of romantic relationships, a clearer understanding of the extent to
which progress has been made in interpersonal communication in post-apartheid
emerges. As opposed to investigating the attitudes of society in general, I thought it
more fruitful to investigate the attitudes of the friends and family of interracial couples
from the perspective of couples themselves. The dialectic frameworks of Impression
Management and Communication Privacy Management offered nuanced lenses from
which to investigate the surveillance dimension in interracial romantic relationships in
post-apartheid South Africa.
Through qualitative in depth interviews, I set out to investigate how and why interracial
couples experience tensions between expressing intimacy in privacy and having to
disclose their relationship to friends and family. Findings suggest that although couples
often negotiated rules to regulate privacy about their relationship, these rules were
enacted through various communicative regimes and strategies. Because disclosing
to friends about the interracial romantic relationship was less complicated, the privacy
and disclosure tension as well as impression management strategies that followed
manifested itself more with family. Partners’ acute awareness of the attitudes that
their friends and family hold toward those of a different race meant that disclosing the
relationship to the family was often seen as the next step in taking the relationship
further. Thus managing disclosure and concealment patterns about the romantic
relationship was a way of living with the stigma of the forbidden. Managing disclosure
and concealment of the status of interracial romantic relationships cannot simply be
associated with just the desire to nurture a newly formed romantic relationship. Race
consciousness is an inexorable part of the management regime of interracial romantic
relationships...