Memorializing the Past: Everyday Life in South Africa After the Truth and Reconciliation Commission by Heidi Grunebaum

Author:Heidi Grunebaum [Grunebaum, Heidi]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Europe, Africa, Political Science, Political Freedom, History, General
ISBN: 9781412844314
Google: kA9pAwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 22110349
Publisher: Transaction Publishers
Published: 2010-10-31T00:00:00+00:00

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Kept in Place: Memorial Cartographies and the Spatial Politics of Containment1

Where does “the past” find its place and how is it kept in place? How does the social visibility of atrocity connect to its being spatially marked? What modes of repression, occlusion and denial operate through the process of memorialization? In the time after the TRC the stories of places and the places of stories have shaped public histories and commemorative practices in ways that mirror the discursive trajectories of the “new” nation’s imaginings. As certain narratives of place and emplaced narratives translate sites of memory into memorials and monuments, they call on the historicity of place through the meanings they evoke. They concretize sites of memory into perceivable (and materialized) objects of the historical imagination. Other sites of memory however become naturalized, fading into the daily lived environment and the private reminiscences of individuals who bear the memories that such places evoke. For many and often conflicting reasons, unmarked sites of memory, usually located within urban topographies, are made invisible to collective social and historical meaning making.

Concretized in monuments, memorials and sites of memory, places of memorial affect contain, sanitize and spatially domesticate histories of atrocity. How then do place, memory and narrative become woven together in memorials and monuments in order to constitute the kinds of regimes of “symbolic efficiencies”2 that mediate and canalize collective expressions of historical consciousness? In addressing these questions in this chapter, I focus on the ways that spatial representations of “the past” both mirror and concretize the modes of temporal, discursive and performative distinctions between past and present examined in the previous chapters. As “the past” becomes concretized in a mutually reinforcing relationship between narrative, memory and spatialized representations, I explore the ways that narrative, when interceding in the mutually evocative relationships between place and memory, works to mark out evacuated spaces, spaces whose associative resonances may be delimited so as to reduce the deeply contested associations and experiences that “place” evokes in a city such as Cape Town.

In Cape Town the accreted historical and material layers of slavery, forced displacement, colonial and apartheid land pillage, socio-economic relations of exploitation and psychosocial geographies of dislocation remain as distinct and, as these become entrenched in new ways, as recalcitrant as ever. What I call memorial cartographies—the routes, circuits and networks of emplaced narratives which constellate spatial and temporal relations grounding and containing historical sensibilities—demarcate “permitted” modes of spatialized remembrances. As Cape Town develops as a spatially, racially, socio-economically divided city in increasingly complex forms, memorial cartographies map historical memory onto the urban landscape in ways that evoke the distinctions, overlappings and continuities between colonial and apartheid white spaces and colonial and apartheid memorials, on the one hand, and the paucity of postcolonial memorials, absence of urban development that redresses the boundaries of socio-economic ghettoization and the historicity of urban space, on the other. Memorial cartographies map historical meaning, simultaneously reflecting similar forms of historical visibilization and social occlusion that institutions of transition management, such as the TRC, inaugurate.

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