dc.description.abstract |
The aim of this article is to analyze the operation of nostalgia in the Apartheid Archive
Project narratives. In total, a corpus of 138 narratives was read with nostalgia as a frame
and 23 narratives were selected for further analysis in which the relationship between
Black subjects and parental figures were the focus. Themes that emerged were the role
of silences, apartheid’s spatial configurations, transferred humiliation, parent’s powerlessness,
and postapartheid efforts to undo the past. The article delves into children’s
traumatic remembrances of parental authority figures being addressed by representatives
of the apartheid state and the resulting cognizance of themselves, as racialized
subjects materialize. To make a postapartheid self, the article shows, the memory of
subjection appears to rely on an ambivalent identification with the parental figure and
becomes the object of a nostalgia that oscillates dialectically between the dystopian
realities of apartheid racism and utopian remembrances of the family. |
en |