History as the Main Complaint

William Kentridge and the Making of Post‐apartheid South Africa

Bibliographic Data

ID9309358
AuthorsJessica Dubow (0000-0003-0429-0175), Ruth Rosengarten
Year2004
Volume27
Issue4
Pages671-690
Publication date2004-09-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueArt History (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0141-6790 • E-ISSN: 1467-8365
PublisherOxford University Press (OUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1111/j.0141-6790.2004.00443.x
OpenAlexW2158046490
LanguageEN
Citations received7

This essay considers the relation of history to memory in the process of radical political change. Looking at the work of William Kentridge in the context of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, it argues the ways that the language of nation‐building fails to account for the experience of trauma as it resists absorption into the structures of historical time and the ‘talking cure’. In particular, it considers how Kentridge's unique graphic techniques of film animation contest the logic of closure, recovery and renewal that the political and psychic imperatives of ‘new’ nationhood seem to demand. In the radical upheaval to which he submits visuality as much as chronology and teleology, and in the eruption of historical debris through the visual surface, his work disables all sense of resolution

Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · CONTEST · Context (archaeology · Literature · Political science · Politics · Psychic · African history and culture studies · Digital Storytelling and Education · History · Law · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration · South African History and Culture

Tools

Open DOISci-Hub