Students engaged in the spring 2015 protests on the University of Cape Town campus demanded the removal of the statue of Cecil John Rhodes, prompting renewed debate over the appropriate treatment of colonial and apartheid-era statuary in contemporary South African public spaces. While the students' protests were often dismissed in public discourse and media coverage as misguided or misinformed, this article situates them in the broader context of symbolic reparations central to the transition to multiracial democracy. We introduce the terms 'monologic commemoration' and 'multiplicative commemoration' to describe the two dominant phases of South African public memory initiatives during and after apartheid. Monologic commemoration promotes a singular historical narrative of national identity and heroic leadership, whereas multiplicative commemoration requires the representation of as many diverse experiences and viewpoints as possible. We examine the #RhodesMustFall campaign as an eruption of discontent with both the monologic and multiplicative approaches, potentially signalling a new 'post-transitional' phase of South African public culture.
Foundational theories of the public sphere prioritize civic speech while distrusting forms of visuality. As a corrective to this model of the public sphere, rhetorical theorists have recently emphasized visuality as a constitutive mode of contemporary public culture, but they nevertheless tend to prioritize the civic actor over the civic spectator. A productive alternative would begin to distinguish an emerging shift from “deliberative publicity” to “photographic publicity.” The bourgeois public sphere innovated verbal communicative practices that produced a specifically deliberative publicity, enabling one resolution to the core political problems of an earlier (feudal) era. Likewise, contemporary publics utilize emerging digital technologies to produce a specifically photographic publicity, allowing them to address fundamental limitations of the bourgeois public sphere. Photographic publicity helps us rethink the problem of the public sphere in terms of theatricality and civic spectatorship.
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