Future nostalgia

English Academy Review, 2017

In this article, I explore the representation of South Africa’s transition after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in Jacob Dlamini’s Native Nostalgia, a provocative account of the author’s childhood in a Johannesburg township during apartheid. I argue that Dlamini’s engagement with recent South African history and his (re)construction of black identity can be understood in counter-discursive ways as having the potential to subvert some of the official historical narratives that underpin the dominant political structures. Furthermore, I foreground how Dlamini uses his peculiar historiographical method to articulate strong scepticism towards, and anxieties about, the post-TRC socio-political order in which nostalgia for the past, disenchantment with the present and trepidation for the future all co-exist simultaneously in a state of nervous tension.

Scrutiny2: Issues in English Studies in Southern Africa, 2017

In this article, I analyse two recent African autobiographical works for the ways in which they provide counter-hegemonic national discourses in regard to Nigeria and South Africa. The texts are In the Shadow of a Saint (2001), Ken Wiwa's memoir and biographical homage to his father, the martyred Nigerian writer and activist, Ken Saro-Wiwa, and Native Nostalgia (2009) by the South African historian, Jacob Dlamini. The article highlights the different ways in which each author challenges official discourses of post-conflict national reconciliation through the re-imagining of national histories, the narrative reconstruction of social/cultural identity and the depiction of space. Furthermore, it highlights how the subgenre of postcolonial life-writing is deployed for purposes of literary (re)historicisation and socio-political critique while drawing attention to important divergences, convergences and connections between post-2000 writing from two of Africa's eminent literary sites—Nigeria and South Africa.

The grand narrative of liberatory success in South Africa has made certain kinds of stories extremely controversial because they do not easily fit a neat black-white, evil-good, past-present dichotomy. These stories make more complex a present which is far from perfect and difficult to understand. In this study I look at two life stories told by two journalists in which they speak of life trajectories which are out of step with dominant themes and ideas in the prevailing South African narrative. Jacob Dlamini’s account of his childhood called Native Nostalgia tells the story of a happy black childhood under apartheid and for this he has been accused of making light of the criminal nature of apartheid. Nevertheless an unapologetic Dlamini is determined to have his experience recognised as valid and true, even if uncomfortable. Then City Press editor Ferial Haffajee, a beneficiary of post-apartheid affirmative action and the expansion of the black middle class, has told her positive, personal, post-apartheid story in What if there were no whites in South Africa. For her outspoken opinions, Haffajee has been denounced by the black intelligentsia for “wearing rose-coloured spectacles” and not understanding persistent privilege and exclusion in present-day South Africa. Both accounts insist on the value of an individual life and story. Both take on intellectually legitimate, but also hegemonic, attitudes about apartheid and post-apartheid. Both add facets and insights to our understanding of lives under transition. Both accounts ask us to rethink our certainties about black lives in South Africa.

South African Defence Force veterans frequently evince nostalgia for their service in the apartheid army. This has invited censure as commentators regard it as self-evident that nostalgia for the oppressive apartheid regime is ethically dubious. However, such assumptions fail to employ the resources of moral philosophy to buttress and nuance their pronouncements. In this article, we argue that nostalgia can be understood as a bittersweet longing for irretrievable personal pasts, a yearning for times when South African Defence Force veterans felt a sense of belonging to a brotherhood in arms and to the imaginary white nation. However, this is not necessarily synonymous with a desire to reinstitute apartheid. We then offer a brief survey of significant difficulties posed by three prominent camps within moral philosophy (deontology, consequentialism and virtue ethics) for evaluating this post-apartheid nostalgia as a moral or ethical problem. We find that the emphasis on voluntary or deliberate action entrenched in mainstream moral thinking constitute substantial obstacles to arriving at sound judgements regarding the nature of nostalgia. We argue that nostalgia, properly understood, cannot fulfil commonplace theoretical and intuitive requirements for moral relevance. We therefore challenge the notion that definitive ethical judgements can usefully be made about post-apartheid nostalgia.

Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education, 2014

The curriculum has been proposed as a powerful means with the potential to initiate social transformation. It reflects the dominant social, economical and political discourses and for this reason it seems reasonable to situate reconciliatory discourses in relation to the curriculum. Whilst curriculum scholars mostly agree that we need to seek new directions and ways of understanding curriculum, there is little consensus about the direction the field should take. Two particular issues that this article addresses are the tendency of curriculum practitioners to tackle social issues at a symptomatic level instead of considering the roots of the problems, and the over-emphasis on the political dimension with little or no attention given to the ethical dimensions of the curriculum. In an attempt to develop new ways of understanding curriculum and enabling social change, I explore nostalgia as a way to stimulate dialogue over competing narratives. To facilitate this exploration, I draw on the notion of the ethical turn in the study of curriculum and the theory of intersectionality. Examples from South Africa are used to develop the argument. I conclude by situating the discussion in the context of other post-conflict societies where reconciliation is needed.

This paper seeks to address the nostalgic affect as a whole, but more particularly how it may be used as an analytical lens to better understand and connect with the landscape of past, present and future within a racialised society. I argue that nostalgia can indeed be used as a critical analytical tool that can provide signs of an irresolute past and also insight into orientations with present and future realities.

Mediating Memory: Tracing the Limits of Memoir Edited by Bunty Avieson, Fiona Giles and Sue Joseph, 2018

Childhood is a rich and fertile terrain for the writing of memoir. Not only does it deliver deep, intense memories filled with sensory information, it also often provides these details in the idiosyncratic language and mis/understandings of a child. To approach these narratives with the wisdom, experience and world-weariness of adulthood is to experience the frisson of re-entering a moment of life which is closed forever and can never be regained in quite the same way, except tangentially or vicariously (and often through this genre). Childhood memoirs of apartheid-era South Africa written by both black and white authors evoke this same intensity all childhood memoirs are capable of. But their imbeddedness in a historical moment now passed lends them the supplementary aura of testimony and quasi-history. This is especially the case when the author is black and has suffered the deprivations of apartheid oppression and the experience of listening to a voice intended to be silenced imparts an extra thrill to the writing. In addition, in parts of the world like South Africa, for women and for black authors, writing memoir or autobiography is often the route to becoming a published writer with recognition and worth, and therefore memoir is also a significant and important vehicle for self-expression and livelihood. South Africa is awash in memoirs both of the formal, edited, published kind and the family stories which are often self-published and of varying quality (see Nixon 2012 for an assessment of the " boom " in nonfiction writing in the post-apartheid era). Many evoke the rich intensity of lives under apartheid as well as the features of testimonial. However, my interest is in childhood narratives that have been written from the vantage point of the post-apartheid moment, which gives the added charge of reaching across a political gulf to explain why childhoods under apartheid might yet have been vivid and extraordinary. This possibility in itself (and readers' present-day enjoyment of such stories) creates a political/social dissonance – of the sort that unsettles the notion that the apartheid era was entirely without joy or fun. This element makes these texts very fascinating to study and to place within the broader genre of memoir. A few of these stories have been met with both critical acclaim and anger and dismay as they are understood by some readers to be making light of the sufferings meted out under apartheid and also of the atrocity of apartheid itself. My argument is that these stories are necessary additions and corrections to the solidified narrative of life under apartheid for black South Africans, which has become, borrowing the insight and words of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2009), a dangerous " single story ". Theorists who deal with memoirs rooted in experiences of colonialism – and apartheid is a form of 'late' colonialism, see Mamdani 1996 – point out that these narratives are important texts to study. In particular those who study " settler " autobiographies (Baena 2009 and Whitlock 2000) are very interesting because they offer insights into the complexities of such childhood narratives that are not often evident in other studies of memoir and memory. Baena asserts that by paying attention to childhood stories other facets – other than those that come through official history – of life under empire are illuminated. Whitlock argues that the tension between history and myth, between colonised spaces and sweet places, tells us less about childhood subjectivity than the use of the idea of childhood in remembrances of things past in autobiography, and ways in which this stands " in vibrant relation " to the present (2000: 182).

The burgeoning genre of archival art practice in post-apartheid South Africa has catalysed the evocation of nostalgia in abundance. The archive has been at the centre of numerous exhibitions in contemporary art. This paper explores the meaning of an emerging nostalgic turn in post-apartheid South Africa. The discussion considers the pleasure afforded by the sentimentality underpinning nostalgia and attends to the manner in which nostalgia coheres with the creative and aesthetic techniques of archival art. Scopophilia and the covert function of the sadomasochistic gaze are outlined. It is suggested that such acts of retrieval and repetition generally override ethical considerations in part because they unfold from the realm of the unconscious. The paper draws on psychoanalysis by way of Frantz Fanon. KEYWORDS Archival art, post-apartheid, nostalgia, Rainbowism, the phobogenic object, the camera and the scene

This thesis examines the experience of loss in Anne Landsman’s novels The Devil’s Chimney (1997) and The Rowing Lesson (2008), and Rachel Zadok’s Gem Squash Tokoloshe (2005). Positing the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) as an impetus for emerging literary traditions within contemporary South African fiction, the argument begins by evaluating the reasons for the TRC’s widespread impact, and considers the role that the individual author may play within a culture which is undergoing dramatic socio-political upheavals. Through theoretical explication, close reading, and textual comparison, the argument initiates a dialogue between psychoanalysis and literary analysis, differentiating between two primary modes of experiencing loss, namely traumatic and nostalgic memory. Out of these sets of concerns, the thesis seeks to understand the inextricability of body, memory and landscape, and interrogates the deployment of these tropes within the contexts of traumatic and nostalgic loss, examining each author’s nuanced invocation. A central tenet of the argument is a consideration, moreover, of how the dialogic imagination has shaped storytelling, and whether or not narrative may provide therapeutic affect for either author or reader. The study concludes with an interpretation of the changing shape of literary expression within South Africa.