Commemorating and forgetting : challenges for the new South Africa / Martin J. Murray.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Murray, Martin J.

Contributor:

EBSCOhost.

Harry E. Humphreys Book Fund.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Social change--Psychological aspects.

Social change.

Political culture.

Public history.

Collective memory.

Historiography.

South Africa--Historiography.

South Africa.

Collective memory--South Africa.

Public history--South Africa.

Political culture--South Africa.

Physical Description:

1 online resource

Place of Publication:

Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 2013.

System Details:

text file

Summary:

When the past is painful and riddled with violence and injustice as it is in post-apartheid South Africa, remembrance presents a problem that is at once practical and ethical: how much of the past must be preserved and how much must be forgotten for the nation to unify and move forward? Martin J. Murray explores the new South Africa's confrontation with this dilemma is Commemorating and Forgetting. More broadly, this book reveals how collective memory works-how framing events, persons, and places worthy of recognition and honor entails a selective appropriation of the past, not a mastery of history. How is the historical past made to appear in the present? In addressing these questions, Murray shows how collective memory is stored and disseminated in architecture, statuary, monuments and memorials, literature, and art-"landscapes of remembrance" that selectively recall and even fabricate history in the service of nation-building. He examines such vehicles of memory in post-apartheid South Africa and parses the stories they tell-stories by turn sanitized, distorted, embellished, and compressed. Commemorating and Forgetting marks a critical move toward recognizing how the legacies and impositions of white minority rule, far from being truly past, remain embedded in, intertwined with, and imprinted on the new nation's here and now. Book jacket.

Contents:

Memory and amnesia after apartheid

The power of collective memory

White lies: myth-making and social memory in the service of white minority rule

Facing backward, looking forward: the politics of remembering and forgetting

Collective memory in place: the Voortrekker Monument and the Hector Pieterson Memorial

Haunted heritage: visual display at District Six and Robben Island

Makeshift memorials: marking time with vernacular remembrance

Textual memories: autobiographical writing at a time of uncertainty

Epilogue: history and heritage.

Notes:

Description based on print version record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Electronic reproduction. Ipswich, MA Available via World Wide Web.

Local Notes:

Acquired for the Penn Libraries with assistance from the Harry E. Humphreys Book Fund.

ISBN:

145293956X

9781452939568

Publisher Number:

99958768263

Access Restriction:

Restricted for use by site license.