Refusing Transcendence: The Deaths of Biko and the Archives of Apartheid (original) (raw)

2014, Impossible Mourning

This chapter is concerned with the question of remains, and in particular what remains after we imagine ourselves to have dealt with the trauma of the past in ways that enable us to move on. Since the time of the murder of the anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko in 1977, photographs and artworks depicting his corpse have been in public circulation. This chapter takes these images as its focus and reads Biko's murder as an instance of what the anthropologist Veena Das terms " bad death " —that is, a death that is difficult, complicated and even impossible to mourn. Through my readings of multiple images of Biko's corpse, I consider the relation between mourning, repression, and the archive. I argue that because of the ways in which they exceed the narrative of the apartheid state and the dominant post-apartheid narrative of reconciliation and healing, such works prevent Biko's death from being consigned to the archive. In this way these works also lead those who view them to engage with the unresolved, unmourned deaths of others, and to recognize that to which we cannot be reconciled. In the argument I make here, about and through a series of photographs and artworks that portray Biko's corpse, the archive comes to stand for an immense space of national repression. I argue that by eluding archival capture , and thereby a particular kind of coherence and closure, images of Biko's corpse remind us of what remains unresolved, often also of that which we would rather forget. I read the visibility of Biko's wounded corpse as a gesture toward the possibility of a different kind of body politic from that imagined into being during the transition from apartheid.