Confronting disillusionment: on the rediscovery of socialist archives in recent South African cultural production

Abstract

In recent years, South African literature, art, and cultural criticism have been registering the feelings of disappointment, nostalgia, and of a general impasse that signify a crisis of postapartheid imaginations. At the same time, we can observe a turn in cultural production toward reexamining South Africa's socialist archives and reconnecting them to the present-day predicaments and emerging social movements. Reading these processes in Imraan Coovadia's latest novel, artworks by Haroon Gunn-Salie, and an exhibition by the Stellenbosch Open Forum, this article argues that they confront the feelings of postapartheid disillusionment by critically re-invoking memories of the 1970-80s socialist practices in South Africa and the transnational frameworks they involved. It argues that these changing approaches to the socialist archives can be read as a decolonial critique, which links the described trends in South African culture to other "post-dependence" (and specifically, post-socialist) contexts worldwide.

Remembering Transition in Contemporary South African and Russian Literatures: Between Melancholia and Repair

“…Timothy Wright (2019) stresses, more specifically, the shift in such temporal constructions during the 2010s: "If the South Africa of 1994 to 2012 was haunted by the spectre of apartheid, most visibly in its obsession with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), South Africa post-2012 can broadly be said to be haunted by a new ghost: the ghost of 1994 itself" (200). Indeed, when it seemed that South African social imagination has moved beyond the 'post-transitional' (Frenkel and McKenzie 2010), notable works of literature, film, and art along with broader public discourses started returning to the time of transition or the practices of the Left during the 1980s (Robbe 2018, Wright 2019. In Russia, similarly, the late 2000s suggested a shift beyond the dominant 'post-Soviet' temporality (as in assessing everything in the present via comparison to the Soviet) towards a multiplicity of co-existing times (Platt 2009).…”

Africa and the crisis of socialism: postsocialism and the Left

“…Still, the past survives in the memories of Ethiopians and East German-educated Mozambicans, as David Ratner and Tanja Müller demonstrate in this collection. In South African contemporary cultural production, the leftist politics and ideas that flourished during the national liberation struggle are being rediscovered (Robbe 2018), while in Angola, the 1977 Marxist revolt of Nito Alves appears to haunt the MPLA (Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola) regime even today (Saul 2014). As noted above and analyzed in the contribution by Alexander Stroh, Sankara's image inspired the recent popular movement that associated democratic rule with both progress and social justice.…”