Interracial Publics

This article examines the formation of “interracial publics” in postapartheid South Africa, showing how race, intimacy, and belonging are negotiated through mediated encounters. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, and media analysis, it traces how relationships between people historically classified as “white” and “nonwhite” become publicly visible and collectively interpreted across print, broadcast, and digital platforms. These publics are ambivalent and contested: they can normalize formerly forbidden intimacies and foster cross-racial connection, yet they also reinscribe racialized hierarchies through gendered and sexualized discourse. Situating these dynamics within South Africa’s longer histories of settler colonialism and apartheid, the article argues that the regulation of intimacy has been central to projects of racial governance and white supremacy and continues to animate their afterlives in contemporary struggles over visibility, belonging, and desire. Interracial intimacy functions as both a measure and a mediator of contemporary racial formations, contributing to comparative anthropological debates on race, media, affect, and the public sphere in postcolonial societies.