History after Apartheid: Visual Culture and Public Memory in a Democratic South Africa

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Description

The democratic election of Nelson Mandela as president of South Africa in 1994 marked the demise of apartheid and the beginning of a new struggle to define the nation’s past. History after Apartheid analyzes how, in the course of the momentous shift to an inclusive democracy, South Africa’s visual and material culture represented the past whilst at the same time contributing to the process of social transformation. Making an allowance for attempts to invent and get better historical icons and narratives, art historian Annie E. Coombes examines how strategies for embodying different models of historical knowledge and experience are negotiated in public culture—in monuments, museums, and latest fine art.

History after Apartheid explores the dilemmas posed by a variety of visual and material culture including key South African heritage sites. How prominent must Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress be in the museum at the infamous political prison on Robben Island? How must the postapartheid government handle the Voortrekker Monument mythologizing the Boer Trek of 1838? Coombes highlights the contradictory investment in these sites among competing constituencies and the tensions involved in the rush to produce new histories for the “new” South Africa.

She reveals how artists and museum officials struggled to adequately represent painful and difficult histories ignored or disavowed under apartheid, including slavery, homelessness, and the attempted destruction of KhoiSan hunter-gatherers. Describing how latest South African artists address historical memory and the ambiguities uncovered by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Coombes illuminates a body of work dedicated to the struggle to concurrently needless to say the past and move forward into the future.


The democratic election of Nelson Mandela as president of South Africa in 1994 marked the demise of apartheid and the beginning of a new struggle to define the nation’s past. History after Apartheid analyzes how, in the course of the momentous shift to an inclusive democracy, South Africa’s visual and material culture represented the past whilst at the same time contributing to the process of social transformation. Making an allowance for attempts to invent and get better historical icons and narratives, art historian Annie E. Coombes examines how strategies for embodying different models of historical knowledge and experience are negotiated in public culture—in monuments, museums, and latest fine art.

History after Apartheid explores the dilemmas posed by a variety of visual and material culture including key South African heritage sites. How prominent must Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress be in the museum at the infamous political prison on Robben Island? How must the postapartheid government handle the Voortrekker Monument mythologizing the Boer Trek of 1838? Coombes highlights the contradictory investment in these sites among competing constituencies and the tensions involved in the rush to produce new histories for the “new” South Africa.

She reveals how artists and museum officials struggled to adequately represent painful and difficult histories ignored or disavowed under apartheid, including slavery, homelessness, and the attempted destruction of KhoiSan hunter-gatherers. Describing how latest South African artists address historical memory and the ambiguities uncovered by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Coombes illuminates a body of work dedicated to the struggle to concurrently needless to say the past and move forward into the future.

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