“Troubling” stories: thoughts on the making of meaning of shame/ful memory narratives in (post)apartheid South Africa (original) (raw)
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Just as stories about the past are constructed in particular ways, so too are silences about historical events. Silences about what happened in the past are catalysed by a range of factors including expedience, fear, perceptions of threat, a need to protect, political amnesia, trauma and moral injury. Historical silences are constructed within social spaces and in people’s own accounts of their personal histories and identities. Silences are thus both personal and relational constructs that do not remain static, but rather shift and evolve, and can be disrupted. This article reflects on work conducted by the Legacies of Apartheid Wars Project between 2012 and 2014 at Rhodes University. The aim of these reflections is to explore the theoretical implications of work that sought to intervene in realms of silence and constrained memory, and invite public dialogical engagements with the past. The aim of these engagements was to acknowledge the complexities of apartheid’s legacies and some of the silences enfolded in those complexities, cognisant of the dynamic relationship between speaking and silence in how work of this nature engages with contested political, social and cultural terrains. The work of the Legacies of Apartheid Wars Project could, therefore, be said to comprise memory activism in the midst of ongoing contestation regarding how to make meaning of both the past and the present in the Southern African context.
On White Shame and Vulnerability
South African Journal of Philosophy 30 (3):472-483 (2011)
In this paper I address a tension in Samantha Vice’s claim that humility and silence offer effective moral responses to white shame in the wake of South African apartheid. Vice describes these twin virtues using inward-turning language of moral self-repair, but she also acknowledges that this ‘personal, inward directed project’ has relational dimensions. Her failure to explore the relational strand, however, leaves her description of white shame sounding solitary and penitent. My response develops the missing relational dimensions of white shame and humility arguing that this strand, once visible, complicates Vice’s project by (1) challenging her unitary and homogenous view of white identity, and (2) demonstrating the important role vulnerability plays in our understandings of white shame.
2016
The ̳new‘ nationalisms that have developed in postcolonial Jamaica and South Africa invite the reclamation of the slave mother, while simultaneously ̳cleansing‘ her body of slavery‘s atrocities for the purpose of national healing. Michelle Cliff‘s Abeng and No Telephone to Heaven, and Zoë Wicomb‘s David‟s Story and Playing in the Light, reveal this national practice of elision, and especially how the disremembering of slavery factors into personal identity formation. A deeper glance into this process exposes the lingering white supremacist, patriarchal symbolic at the centre of these nations, which maintains its centrality through the erasure of the slave mother and the disavowal of rape—two things which inevitably obscure the intersection of race and sex. The colonial residue of shame and trauma, left uninterrogated in the national script, imprints itself on women of colour and affects our legibility in society today. This dissertation evaluates the exclusion of slavery and the sla...
Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2018
Domestic labour in South Africa has historically been a site of racial inequality which has continued into the post-apartheid era despite extensive transformation efforts. This article argues that silence presents an avenue for understanding how such racial hierarchy has persisted. We present a qualitative case study of a domestic labour dyad utilising the diary-interview method to analyse the presentation of labour troubles and the perceptions, interpretations, and implications of the unsaid regarding such troubles. Drawing from the data, we demonstrate how intimacy is foregrounded in talk, while domestic labour activities and domestic labour itself go unsaid. We conclude that the intimate nature of domestic labour allows participants to speak about their relationship in ways that make the labour relationship and its racial inequalities become invisible in talk, making it a difficult institution to challenge and change.
The ghost of memory : literary representations of slavery in post-apartheid South Africa
2018
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Negotiating memory and nation building in new South African drama
2009
This thesis examines the representation of trauma and memory in six post-Apartheid plays. The topic is explored through a treatment of the tropes of racial segregation, different forms of dispossession as well as violence. The thesis draws its inspiration from the critical and self-reflexive engagements with which South African playwrights depict the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The dramatists are concerned with the contested nature of the TRC as an experiential and historical archive. Others explore the idea of disputed and seemingly elusive notions of truth (from the embodied to the forensic). Through the unpacking of the TRC, as reflected in three of the plays, the thesis argues that apart from the idea of an absolute or forensic truth, the TRC is also characterised by the repression of truth. Furthermore, there is a consideration of debates around amnesty, justice, and reparations. Underpinning the politics and representations of trauma and memory, the thesis also interrogates the concomitant explorations and implications of identity and citizenship in the dramas. In the experience of violence, subjugation and exile, the characters in the dramas wrestle with the physical and psychological implications of their lived experiences. This creates anxieties around notions of self and community whether at home or in exile and such representations foreground the centrality of memory in identity construction. All these complex personal and social challenges are further exacerbated by the presence of endemic violence against women and children as well as that of rampart crime. The thesis, therefore, explores the negotiation of memory and identity in relation to how trauma could be mitigated or healing could be attained. The thesis substantially blurs the orthodox lines of differentiation between race and class, but emphasises the centrality of the individual or self in recent post-Apartheid engagements.
Surfeit and Silence: Sexual Violence in the Apartheid Archive
African Studies, 2023
Despite contemporary concerns about sexual violence in South Africa, the longer history of violence against women has been insufficiently explored. This article examines the apartheid-era archive on sexual violence, exploring what methodologies can be used and histories written based on its contents. It argues that this archive is marked by a contradictory dichotomy of both excess and absence. While many sources from the 1950s to 1980s, and particularly white-authored ones, ignore sexual violence, others depict it in abundance and often gruesome detail. This surfeit of material shockingly confronts the researcher through both its quantity and the violent racism and misogyny that permeates each narrative. Yet there are coinciding glaring silences in the archive, particularly pertaining to Black women's subjectivities. This renders Black women both hyper visible and invisible in the apartheid archive. Sexual violence is simultaneously hidden, spectacularised and made quotidian and banal. This article grapples with this peculiar mix of surfeit and silence and what the archive means for contemporary understandings of sexual violence in South Africa.