Monument, Ruin, and Redress in South African Heritage
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 9854845 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Daniel Herwitz (0000-0002-4374-7206, University of Michigan–Flint, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2011 |
| Volume | 86 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 232-248 |
| Publication date | 2011-10-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The Germanic Review Literature Culture Theory (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0016-8890 • E-ISSN: 1930-6962 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/00168890.2011.615288 |
| OpenAlex | W2167940911 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
Apartheid ended in 1991, but its monuments were still standing. And so the question for the new government, brought to power in the first democratic elections in South African history (1994), was: What to do with them? Around these monuments had been generated powerful communalizing energies for the National Party, itself a cruel phoenix arisen from the ruination of the Afrikaner peoples in the Boer War; their devaluing of African culture had been a central symbol for the apartheid state. In response the moment of political transition to democracy was scripted as a de-monumentalizing one. This essay narrates the transitional moment and through a reading of the South African Constitutional Court considers whether the chief instances of this de-monumentalizing language were not in fact monumentalizing by other means. The question has no easy answer but is rather a window into the cultural politics of the transition. Keywords: Constitutional CourtmonumentruinSouth Africatransition Acknowledgments This essay is taken in part from Daniel Herwitz, Live Action Heritage (New York: Columbia University Press, forthcoming, 2012). Notes Giorgio Agamben and Daniel Heller-Roazen, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). For a wonderful discussion of Joburg Stories, see Lucia Saks, “The Space of New Citizenship in Democratic South Africa?” in Ruins of Modernity, ed. Julia Hell and Andreas Schönle (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 151–65. Nick Shepherd, “Heritage,” in New South African Keywords, ed. Nick Shepherd and Steven Robins (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2008), 116–28. Annie Coombes, History after Apartheid: Visual Culture and Public Memory in a Democratic South Africa (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003). See, for example, Patrick Lenta, unpublished Master's thesis, University of Natal. Aldo Rossi, The Architecture of the City (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1984). Daniel Herwitz, Race and Reconciliation: Essays from the New South Africa (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). James E. Young, At Memory's Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 118
Art history · Citizenship · Democracy · Modernity · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Redress · Sociology · State (computer science · African history and culture studies · History · Law · Legal Issues in South Africa · South African History and Culture
| Unique citing works | 3 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,3 |
| Citation span | 2016 - 2019 (4) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 3 |