This book deals with the haunting power of histories of mass violence. In the aftermath of political conflict and following transitions to peace and democracy, countries attempt to rebuild political structures and shape social relationships in the hope of creating more peaceful futures. Yet, the memory of past violence does not stay neatly in the past. It troubles and disruptsâhauntsâour best efforts to move forward. Along with important social and political efforts, it is crucial that peace-building processes also grapple with and respond to the individual and collective memory ghosts of past violence. And so, at a time when many nations are struggling against their own injustices and attempting to acknowledge their own violent pasts, this volume is dedicated to assessing the many forms of memory traces that are left behind in the wake of violent histories and what it means to respond to these legacies ethically, contextually and creatively.
The starting point for the story of this book was the South African context, a country known both for its painful histories of racist violence and oppression, as well as its celebrated transition to liberation and democracy. Yet, a quarter of a century following this transition, many South Africans who suffered under apartheid, continue to suffer under democracy. The lack of transformation is particularly striking for the millions who continue to live in dehumanising âtownshipâ spaces, originally created by the apartheid state to house South Africans classified as âblackâ by this racially oppressive system. As these spaces grow in the post-apartheid era, so too does the sense of social, political and economic exclusion from the promised, hoped-for, liberation. Cities such as Cape Town, add further insult to injury, as the stark juxtaposition between wealth, beauty and luxury confront those who suffer with conditions entirely unfit for human lives. For these South Africans the haunting power of the past is not simply a memory of past violence, but a lived, everyday experience of continued suffering and exclusion.
For many of the people who live through this painful reality, they experience it through a heavy mix of confusion, anger, betrayal and despair. Where there was a moment of hope for the future in the lead up to transition, today their future feels dark seeped in a growing sense of despair. This haunted condition is not simply the burden of the victims of apartheid, in many ways its weight falls more heavily on the generation that came after apartheid, the so-called âborn-freeâ in popular South African parlance. On the one hand, they carry the hopes and dreams of liberation on their shoulders, yet they continue to live in conditions of oppression and exclusion. This haunted hope recently gave way to the student movements #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall, which again saw the youth take up the banner of struggle against the intersecting race and class injustice which permeates South African society, and particularly university spaces. Day by day these young South Africans are re-living the memory of the past, not simply as memory but also as concrete reality.
The metaphor of haunted memory has been used to describe the nature of psychic trauma and its intergenerational transmission (Abraham and Torok 1994). From this South African example, however, it is clear that we need to rethink this conceptualisation in ways which include the social, economic and political forms of haunting that are entangled with the intergenerational psychic realm. Similarly, Stephen Froshâs (2013) book Haunting, Psychoanalysis and Ghostly Transmissions demonstrates how the ghosts of the past are not simply a metaphor for psychic trauma. They are also materially expressed through the external, material and structural factors at work in remembering the past. As Frosh (2013, 167â8) explains:
For countries like South Africa this understanding of hauntingâas an intertwining of the psychic and the materialâis central to how we understand and deal with memories of violent past/presents. This conceptualisation means that dealing with the ghosts of the past is not only important for collective psychological healing but also crucial for processes of doing justice to the legacy of the past (Derrida 1994; Gordon 1997/2008; Frosh 2013). This is the justice that emerges in the ethical act of tending to and repairing the entangled wounds of the past that call out in the present and towards the future.This is to say that the symbolic structures of culture â practices, traditions, rituals, class divisions, racialisations, gender discrimination, media representations, literary heritages and so on and so forth, all with their counterpoints in other structures that are hidden, denied and delegitimised â are themselves modes of remembrance.
It is the complicated condition of âhaunted freedomâ in South Africa, and particularly the burden it places on future generations, that sparked our desire to understand the issue of post-conflict memory in global perspective. We wanted to explore locally relevant practices of transforming the haunting power of the past from the perspective of different country case studies to think through the following questions: How might we promote new and deeper understandings of the relationship between memories of violence and on-going violence, in South Africa and elsewhere as well? What does it mean to transform this legacy that haunts us? How does the South African experience provide insight to better understand contemporary hauntings around the world? How do experiences in other national settings shed clearer light on better resolving South Africaâs on-going struggles?
Post-Conflict Hauntings is a result of our exploration into these questions from two complementary directions. The first reports on a locally focused five-year research project designed to deepen our understanding of the nature of post-conflict hauntings in the South African context. Chapters eight and nine of this volume draw on an analysis of this data. Other chapters, however, are globally focused and seek to generate spaces for conversations with scholars and practitioners from a variety of different post-conflict settings. Many of the chapters are products of a number of conferences held at the University of Stellenbosch, over the last three years, and one at a symposium âLiving with the Haunting Power of the Pastâ, held in 2018 in Kigali, Rwanda.
How we deal with legacies of past violence speaks to one of the most pressing global issues of our time. The concern is urgent precisely because we have witnessed, all too many times, the cyclical nature of violent conflict. The history of violence has often been identified in the peace-building literature as key to understanding obstacles to the economic, political and legal processes of rebuilding society. Collective or haunted memories of past violence have the power to shape the path of political transitions and world politics (Bell 2006; Assmann and Shortt 2012), they also hold the potential to derail traditional peace-keeping and conflict resolution methods (Cairns and Roe 2003; Bar-Tal 2007; Tint 2010) and are passed down through generations (Volkan 2001; Lorey and Beezley 2002; Argenti and Schramm 2010). This haunted memory often becomes the site of repetition. However, chapters in this volume consider as well particular sites and various practices where the goal has explicitly been to transform memory to overcome various presents pre-occupied with their violent pasts.
This book backgrounds the violence per se and aspires to contribute to the emerging work that seeks to understand what it means to deal with the psychosocial effects of contemporary legacies of mass violence (Hamber and Gallagher 2015). More specifically, it places at the centre of analysis memory and the many ways it can trouble the process of reconciliation; the various contributors build into their analyses the challenges implicit in transforming the haunting power of post-conflict memory instead to positive good. The following chapters, in sum, draw together insights from diverse theoretical, empirical and practical approaches to further understand how memories of mass violence continue to haunt present-day politics, society and culture and ways to mitigate their potency.
There have already been important theoretical and practical strides made in this area. Theoretically the âtrauma theoryâ that sought to understand the aftermath of the Holocaust provides a crucial starting point for many of the chapters to engage with, contest and contribute to. Practically, the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), which immediately followed the end of apartheid, was designed to do the work of dealing with collective memories of violence by creating national spaces of healing and social repair. It has become a model of social innovation that other countries have followed. At the same time, South Africa continues to struggle with what has been referred to as the âunresolved businessâ of the TRC (Swart 2017, 2). While the TRC opened the door and set the ethical tone for a global, collective imperative to deal with the collective trauma of memories of violence, this process was also inevitably haunted by exclusions, assumptions and limitations. This book aims to deepen and expand this important work of collective and intergenerational repair in the aftermath of violence. Drawing from different contexts across the globe, these chapters offer alternative, culturally relevant and creative/artistic practices that move beyond the Western psychoanalytic frameworks of trauma and healing.
This introductory chapter seeks to conceptually frame the work of the following chapters within the over-arching notion of Post-Conflict Hauntings. It demonstrates how this concept asks us to open up new ways of understanding time in relation to post-conflict processes of peace-building. It argues that the present-day condition of our global age, requires us to take seriously Jacques Derridaâs shift in perspective from âontologyâ to âhauntologyâ and what this means for processes of collective repair in the aftermath of violence (Derrida 1994). It then hones in on the psychoanalytic concept of trauma which has historically come to frame the way in which post-conflict states deal with haunted memory. It unfolds some of the theoretical developments and contestations that have emerged in relation to the trauma...