Transitioning racialized spaces

Abstract

South Africa is often cited as being a society in transition. Travelling from apartheid to utopia, the metaphor implies, we are transforming in the in-between. For Winnicott, transitional spaces reside in between internal and external reality, offering an intermediate area in which to play. It could be said that, in contrast, apartheid structures impeded such transitional spaces; they defined where and where not to play, who could play with whom and what was serious and thereby not available for creativity. By analyzing narratives written by South Africans remembering apartheid as part of the Apartheid Archives Project (the narratives themselves potentially, but not always, representing a transitional space), I first explore how space is remembered and inscribed, including how physical spaces, such as beaches or restaurants, are carved out by the act of remembering. Second the narratives, written now about then, offer possibilities for exploring transitions between the past and the present and implications for playing in the present and the future.

East German museums of everyday history as depots for the nostalgic object

“…The doubly transitional state experienced through the passage of time with its accompanying losses, and the transformations brought about by regime change, have led to the application of the notion of the transitional object and/or transitional space to t a sitio al a d post-t a sitio al so ieties su h as 'ussia Oushaki e, 2000'ussia Oushaki e, , 2007, South Africa (Worby and Ally, 2013;Long, 2011) and East Germany (see Brock and Truscott, 2012, for a comparison of the two contexts). Some disagreement appears to be centred on the question of whether, under these conditions, the object can aid transitio , o hethe , a esti g de elop e t Oushaki e, 2000), it in fact makes the disjuncture between then and now more palpable.…”

Remembering the past: Nostalgia, traumatic memory, and the legacy of apartheid.

“…The aim of the article is to examine the deeper significance of the denial portrayed in the Apartheid Archive narrative referred to above (henceforth AA Narrative) in the context of post-apartheid and post-TRC South Africa. The Apartheid Archive is a new research resource, and most of the conceptual debates on the Apartheid Archive have been developed from multiple lines of theoretical evidence (for examples of articles that explore Apartheid Archive narratives using psychoanalytic concepts see Hook, 2011;Long, 2011;Straker, 2011aStraker, , 2011b. This article builds on this growing exploratory tradition.…”