History after Apartheid

Annie E. Coombes

Published by Duke University Press 2003

History after Apartheid

Visual Culture and Public Memory in a Democratic South Africa

Annie E. Coombes

https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822384922

Overview
Contents

About this book

How should post-apartheid South Africa present its history - in museums, monuments, and parks.

Author information

Annie E. Coombes teaches art history and cultural studies at Birkbeck College, University of London, where she is Director of Graduate Studies in the School of History of Art, Film, and Visual Media. She is the author of Reinventing Africa: Museums, Material Culture, and Popular Imagination in Late Victorian and Edwardian England and coeditor of Hybridity and Its Discontents: Politics, Science, Culture.

Reviews

“Exquisitely detailed, ethically engaged, theoretically consequential, this book will delight readers across a wide spectrum of the humanities and social sciences. Annie E. Coombes captures the complexities of contemporary South Africa via an intriguing analysis of the country’s public culture. The South African case studies become portable and are intelligently linked to global debates in this highly readable study.”—Isabel Hofmeyr, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg

“With verve, imagination, and engagement, Annie E. Coombes gives us an incisive account of memorial culture in South Africa since apartheid. She foregrounds the political tensions and ambiguities of rehabilitating traditional monuments, making Robben Island into an icon of resistance and liberation, creating museums of urban and township living that hover between reflective nostalgia and traumatized remembrance. Revisionism is a political necessity, but how is one to remember a brutal and painful history without rekindling the divisive passions of the past? A must read for anyone interested in memory culture on a global scale.”—Andreas Huyssen, author of Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
List of Illustrations Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
Acknowledgments Publicly Available Download PDF	xiii
List of Abbreviations Publicly Available Download PDF	xvii
Introduction: Making History Memorable Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
1 Translating the Past: Apartheid Monuments in Postapartheid South Africa Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	19
2 Robben Island: Site of Memory / Site of Nation Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	54
3 District Six: The Archaeology of Memory Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	116
4 New Histories for Old: Museological Strategies Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	149
5 What’s in a Name? The Place of ‘‘Ethnicity’’ in the ‘‘New’’ South Africa Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	206
6 New Subjectivities for the New Nation Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	243
Epilogue: Changing Places Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	279
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	297
Bibliography Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	339
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	355

Language: English
Publisher: Duke University Press
Pages
- Main content: 400
Illustrations
- Other: 117 photos, incl. 11 in color

eBook

Published: November 24, 2003
ISBN: 9780822384922