Race, Memory and the Apartheid Archive: Towards a Transformative Psychosocial Praxis

For decades the global gaze on South African society invariably focused on it as a symbol of the inevitable excesses of social engineering, racism and violence under the apartheid dispensation; with astonishment at the apparent exceptionalism of the 'miracle' transition that occurred to democratic rule and the dismantling of apartheid; and more recently, on the resurgence of newer manifestations of racialisation and violence in post-apartheid South Africa. Race, Memory and the Apartheid Archive: Towards a Transformative Psychosocial Praxis recognises and confronts this complex history of racialised oppression, as well as the future possibilities and impossibilities of transforming South African society through a re-engagement with the apartheid archive - an archive that holds the promise of not only revisiting and augmenting our history through the storied lives of ordinary citizens, but also allows us to understand the continued impact of this past on our present social, subjective and psychological realities. Located within a psychosocial approach that is uniquely suited to the socio-historical and psychical analysis of racism, this book relies mainly on the memories, stories and narratives of ordinary people, submitted to the Apartheid Archive Project, as its source material. It provokes us into thinking about racism as grounded as much in affective as in macro-political means, in the functioning of both intrapsychic and material forms, perpetuated as much in private as in institutional domains, and the ways in which these understandings can contribute to social transformation.