Slavery and Post-Apartheid Cultural Production in South Africa

In Slavery and Post-Apartheid Cultural Production in South Africa: Holding Memory, Nicola Cloete investigates the intricacies of memory, heritage, identity, and nation-building within the context of South Africa’s history of slavery.

Combining theoretical, archival, and ethnographic research through an interdisciplinary use of memory, the author crafts new frameworks for analysing how memory is mobilised in recovering histories of slavery in post-apartheid South Africa. By examining wine farms, museums and memorials, walking tours, and ethnographic experiences, the book elucidates how memory is embodied and emplaced through affective encounters. Using diverse theoretical approaches to memory, Cloete devises a theory of ‘holding memory’ and ultimately argues that memory enables a validated claim for participation and belonging in the post-apartheid nation for a range of stakeholders through the mobilisation of a previously marginalised historic event.

An important contribution, this book shows how memories of slavery are negotiated and deployed between cultural identity and national discourses of race and reconciliation. It will be of interest to researchers in the fields of cultural and sensory studies and memory studies.