Splintered politics of memory and community resistance

Abstract

Oral history presents an especially effective way of exploring the multitudinous, contradictory, and contextual meanings that are attached to the notion of community. In this study, we argue for narrative‐discourse analysis as a critical means of studying contested community memories. We rely on focus group discussions and individual interviews to explore oral histories of state‐sanctioned relocation of residents of Thembelihle, a low‐income community in Johannesburg, South Africa. Our analysis revealed the sharply splintered politics that characterizes oral histories of this community. We argue that oral histories, in their contradictory and visceral fullness, are able to point toward a politics of resistance that is sensitive to inequalities, and that are willed toward emancipatory future‐building. We conclude by underlining the need for community psychologists to engage with a politics of memory that is sensitive to power differentials, historiography, and broader currents of oppression.

Community participation in a low‐income neighborhood: The salience of sociodemographic characteristics, perceptions and experience of violence, and neighborhood attachment

“…Despite the high levels of neighborhood attachment reported by respondents, there are moments when intracommunity relations are conflictual and strained by violence, suggesting that neighboring and moments of fractured relations are not binary experiences. Community relations shift between neighboring and conflictual socio‐political relations (Cornell et al, 2020 ; Swartz et al, 2012 ).…”

“…While some community members were in favor of the relocation, others were resistant and advocated for the development of the informal settlement. The community dynamics are hence marked by moments of unified action and moments of fragmentation and conflictual social relations (Cornell et al, 2020 ).…”

Multimodality, cultural production, and the protest event: Considerations of space, politics, and affect in South Africa

“…This politico-spatial unfolding is always affectively charged in that it engages with traditions of resistance (which were fundamental to constituting the modern South African state) as well as present-day structures of oppression – both of which signify existential imperatives for the majority of South Africans. Indeed, the continuation of anti-apartheid protest tactics, strategies and even demands carries much affect, just as the high levels of police brutality repeat, in the present, the kinds of trauma on which apartheid rule relied (see Cornell et al, 2020). We might then say that the protest space evokes particular affects for protesters in South Africa, and it is within this affective space that individual actors exercise political agency.…”