Seminar Series: Abstract

09:30
May 20 2009
Seminar Room A

Collective Responsibility and the Politics of Social Remembering in post-apartheid South Africa
Lindi Todd, University of Technology Sydney

Identified as the former beneficiaries of a political system which actively institutionalized racist discrimination, Afrikaners in post-apartheid South Africa have arguably been prescribed to recognize their collective responsibility and prohibited from endorsing the previous regime, both of which have impacted on their ability to claim a moral identity for the future. By employing material on post-Holocaust discussions of German guilt and responsibility to the past, I ask what the relationship can be between morality and striving for recognition where the historically constituted subject or community is no longer recognised as morally legitimate by international and national commentators.

Drawing on the field of ‘social memory studies’ this paper explores the particular narratives and stories of the past claimed and rejected by a group of separatist Afrikaners in the wake of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission: established as a state mechanism involved in the process of remembering. Writing within the context of the ‘history-wars’ in Australia, Goodall has suggested that it is less useful to think of history as a collection of facts, and more productive to think about history ‘as process’. I extend this idea to talk about history as performed in a process of social remembering and how these performances are influenced by their performers, their intended purpose and audiences.

Of particular importance to this discussion, therefore, is how this group is created by its social memory which both acts as a constraint on, and is used to establish, its position in relation to the wider national social group.