Second-year PhD student Anjuli Webster recently published an article in the South African Historical Journal. The article is titled “Transatlantic Knowledge: Race Relations, Social Science and Native Education in Early Twentieth-Century South Africa.” Webster’s faculty advisers are Dr. Clifton Crais and Dr. Yanna Yannakakis. Read the abstract of “Transatlantic Knowledge” below along with the full article.

In this paper I trace knowledge flows between South Africa and the United States in the early twentieth century. I analyse these flows as parts within a broader white supremacist political project and technology of power. Focusing on the early Union period from the 1910s to the 1930s, I explore links, networks and exchanges within and across imperial and colonial spaces that spanned the Atlantic. These include institutional, financial, intellectual and personal relationships and networks between philanthropic institutions, race relations ‘experts’ and social scientists. In particular, I focus on the South African Institute of Race Relations’ role in importing education models from the American South and shaping narratives around ‘native education’ in South Africa. In this case, positivist science functioned to instil and root a racial order. I argue that attending to the circulation and entanglement of ideas between these global spheres offers new insight into the genealogy of anthropological and social scientific knowledge during the historical conjuncture of the Union period.