Abstracts of papers:
The Chimalpahin Conference 2008:
Colonial and Post-Colonial Remembering and Forgetfulness
October 15 - 18, 2008
“The Persistence of Memory” in David Goldblatt and Ivan Vladislavich’s Portraits of South Africa in Transition: From Apartheid to Neo-Liberation
M. Neelika Jayawardane
Department of English Literature
State University of New York/Oswego
Estados Unidos
The controversial expressions of historical and political memory in South Africa, hyper aware of the gaze of the world community as it prepares for the 2010 FIFA World Cup, are highlighted by the efforts to rename and rearrange the nation’s visible, public spaces. In a country still riven by the history of conquest, slave labour, displaced peoples, and the legally mandated inequalities of the apartheid era, responses to reconstructed and re-presented history emphasise the controversies surrounding public memory, nationhood, and identity formation. Monuments to discredited apartheid-era leaders, once proudly tended to, fall into disrepair as the ideas they represented fall out of vogue, while others remain in city squares, a reminder of the persistence of memory. In Cape Town, the airport, once named after the “father of apartheid” D.F. Malan – and appeared as such on Travelocity.com as late as 1994 – is now simply Cape Town International.
In Durban, the old street names (black letters on white metal plates) are currently displayed together with the proposed new names (black letters stamped on yellow plates). The descendants of European immigrants to South Africa, the minority who once had access to absolute power and ownership over the landscape of the country, and who now feel marginalized by the changeover in power, find new ways to voice their dissent: the racist graffiti sprayed over renamed street signs illustrate their disdain. In other instances, the transition happens with barely a comment: the Dutch Reformed Church in the centre of Cape Town was recently bulldozed in order to make way for a shopping mall: an old house of worship erased in order to accommodate a new house of worship. Perhaps there was no need for protest in this case, since those who had power and access in the old church are the same people who now have power and access within the neo-liberal economy of modern South Africa.
David Goldblatt, the veteran South African photographer and recipient of the prestigious Hasselblad Prize for photography in 2006, has been chronicling these ordinary/extraordinary moments of remembrance and erasure since the 1950s, soon after the National Party legally instituted apartheid. His images – then and now in South Africa, wherein he revisited and recorded the same spaces that he photographed throughout the course of the 20th Century – were exhibited in Michael Stevenson Gallery, located in the Waterkant District – the old slave market of Cape Town. Similarly, Johannesburg-based writer, Ivan Vladislavich, creates beautifully nuanced portraits of the city in transition: the manner in which a street hawker takes over a corner to sell his wares in a part of town from which he would have once been barred from entering; the way in which armed security company logos on homes and businesses now take on the same function of offering protection as did religious icons in earlier eras. Goldblatt and Vladislavich’s conceptualizations and representations of history and transition capture individuals and locations within this divided nation while they perform their roles and enact the given frameworks of power, as the memory and memorials of South Africa adapt to change.
About Neelika Jayawardane
M. Neelika Jayawardane teaches contemporary Southern African literature, film, and art; new memoirs and fiction centering on the transnational and postcolonial experience; and courses in globalization, theory, and culture. Her primary and secondary education was at an all-girls' Buddhist school in Colombo, Sri Lanka, and a school set up by the Zambia Consolidated Cooper Mining Company in the Copperbelt Province in Zambia, where the city's public library was her first introduction to what she later understood to be her colonial subjectivity. She holds a doctorate in English, with a focus in Creative Writing, from the University of Denver, Colorado; her Master of Arts and Bachelor of Arts degrees are from Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa. Her current research at the Centre for African Studies at the University of Cape Town focuses on the manner in which labouring bodies have been historically documented, removed, and erased in order to fulfil colonial desires – and how individuals have disconnected themselves from the branding machinery of the nation state as a means of protesting the categorization of the “Othered” body through the map of passports, visas, and permits.