Kim Wale

Transitional justice studies typically focuses on how nations remember, face and deal with histories of past violence. This book, however, shifts the frame from national discourses of transitional justice onto local memory actors who attempt to engage with these broader systems of meaning from below. The case study is based on the memory struggles of individuals and groups who are attempting to gain access to the discourses and benefits associated with dominant memory identities of ‘victim’ and ‘veteran’ in the context of post-transition South Africa. They share a common history of squatter resistance in the Western Cape in the 1980s and a common struggle for inclusion in dominant memory frameworks. The main theme of this book is the politics of memory, as it relates to the conversation between national and local memory. Integrated within this theme is the further theme of alternative histories and counter-memories of struggle from below. In focusing on counter memories of violence and transition this book aims to tell a different version of South African liberation history in relation to the dominant narrative. It analyses local memory actors' attempts to bring their lived histories into conversation with national discourses of reconciliation and the national liberation struggle. In doing so it unpacks a memory paradox occurring within these narratives, which highlights the politics of inclusion and exclusion within the frames of transitional justice knowledge. On the one hand this alternate story exposes the paradox between local and national memory while on the other hand it brings into focus the local experience of the intersection between international transitional justice discourses and national transition politics. This book will be of local and international interest to scholars and students in the field of transitional justice, memory politics, national liberation struggle and South African historiography. It will also be of interest to a broader South Africa public, as it offers a deeper understanding of South Africa’s history, which challenges taken for granted transitional justice frames of knowledge.

Contested Memories of Squatter Resistance in the Western Cape

South Africa's Struggle to Remember

Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela

Jeffrey Prager

This book engages the globally pressing question of how to live and work with the haunting power of the past in the aftermath of mass violence. It brings together a collection of interdisciplinary contributions to reflect on the haunting of post-conflict memory from the perspective of diverse country case studies including South Africa, Rwanda, Zimbabwe, Northern Ireland, North and South Korea, Palestine and Israel, America and Australia. Contributions offer theoretical, empirical and practical insights on the nature of historical trauma and practices of collective healing and repair that include embodied, artistic and culturally relevant forms of wisdom for dealing with the past. While this question has traditionally been explored through the lens of trauma studies in relation to the post-Holocaust experience, this book provides new understandings from a variety of different historical contexts and disciplinary perspectives. Its chapters draw on, challenge and expand the trauma concept to propose more contextually relevant frameworks for transforming haunted memory in the aftermath of historical trauma.

Kim Wale

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