Contents
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Collective Memory and Nation-Building Collective Memory and Nation-Building
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The Challenge of Collective Memory in Nation-Building The Challenge of Collective Memory in Nation-Building
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Seeking a Usable Past for a “New Nation” Seeking a Usable Past for a “New Nation”
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The Liberation Struggle as Foundation Myth of the “New South Africa” The Liberation Struggle as Foundation Myth of the “New South Africa”
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Dialogical Memory: The Power of Public Testimony Dialogical Memory: The Power of Public Testimony
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Collective Memory and Social Amnesia Collective Memory and Social Amnesia
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3 Facing Backward, Looking Forward: The Politics of Remembering and Forgetting
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Published:May 2013
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Abstract
With the collapse of white minority rule and the dismantling of apartheid, citizens of the ‘new South Africa’ are called upon to look two ways in time: back to the racially-divided past to confront painful memories born of discrimination and oppression, and forward to the future – with its attendant risks, uncertainties, and contingent possibilities. Looking backward, they hold onto the past by remembering and commemorating. Looking forward, they envision a radiant future unencumbered and unburdened by the sordid apartheid past. The central conundrum that arises from this Janus-faced, schizophrenic vision has to do with resolving the tension between the politics of remembering and the politics of forgetting. On the one hand, the collapse of apartheid has triggered an enthusiasm for the recovery of those aspects of the national past which white minority rule had tried to erase, suppress, and elide from collective memory. On the other hand, finding a common ground of shared values upon which to forge a unifying national identity requires moving beyond – escaping – the past that had divided the country along racial and ethnic, ‘tribal’ and linguistic lines.
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