Bitter Emotion

Affective Archives and Transnational Solidarity against Apartheid

Bibliographic Data

ID18963699
AuthorsKylie Thomas (0000-0002-4157-0734, Netherlands Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Amsterdam, Netherlands, corresponding author)
Year2021
Volume23
Issue1
Pages42-60
Publication date2021-01-02
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueInterventions (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1369-801X • E-ISSN: 1469-929X
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/1369801x.2020.1813616
OpenAlexW3084039275
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited12

In his book about his Irish–South African family and his childhood under apartheid, White Boy Running, Christopher Hope writes of the “bitter emotion” that infuses the politics of both Ireland and South Africa. This essay considers how the histories of political struggle in both places are intertwined through readings of photographs taken in Ireland and South Africa in the 1970s and 1980s. I draw on these photographs to develop an argument about how affective archives of music, images, and poetry travel across time and space and serve as a conduit for raising awareness about injustice and for forging transnational solidarity. At the same time, these photographs provoke a consideration about how Irish identification with the struggle of black South Africans is complicated by the longer history of British colonialism and racism and how solidarity requires both remembering and forgetting. This essay also begins to trace the presence and work of South African activists in Ireland who campaigned against apartheid while they were in exile

Aesthetics · Art · Colonialism · Injustice · Irish · Political science · Politics · Racism · Sociology · Solidarity · Gender Studies · History · Irish and British Studies · Law · Oral History, Memory, Narrative Analysis · South African History and Culture

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Open DOIOpen Access