The New Financial Elite: Race, Mobility, and Ressentiment After Apartheid

FAIN: FA-252126-17

Anne-Maria Boitumelo Makhulu
Duke University (Durham, NC 27705-4677)

A book-length study of black financial elites in post-apartheid South Africa.

“The New Financial Elite: Race, Mobility, and Ressentiment After Apartheid” sets out to look at the rise of a small, if powerful, class of black financial elites in contemporary South Africa. Focusing on the black upper middle class—their educational backgrounds, professional expertise, aspirations, and pathways to affluence—the project looks at one and the same time at the very particular historical circumstances in which this minority within a minority came to benefit from Black Economic Empowerment legislation soon after democratization in 1994. Adopting both ethnographic and archival methods, "The New Financial Elite" explores the trajectories, desires, and obligations of black elites acknowledging the intensity of contrast between rich and poor in South Africa, a contrast that itself motivates this novel research on class diversity.