Where my dad was from he was quite a respected man

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.