Race, Memory and the Apartheid Archive

Towards a Transformative Psychosocial Praxis

G. Stevens, N. Duncan, D. Hook, G. Stevens, N. Duncan, D. Hook

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137263896
• eBook ISBN: 9781137263902
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: History

Race, Memory and the Apartheid Archive: Towards a Transformative Psychosocial Praxis draws on a psychosocial approach that is uniquely suited to the socio-historical and psychical analysis of racism. The book relies mainly on the memories, stories and narratives of ordinary people living in apartheid South Africa.

1

The Apartheid Archive Project, the Psychosocial and Political Praxis

Garth Stevens, Norman Duncan and Derek Hook

Introduction

The interweaving of objective and subjective forms of racism culminated in the horrific and all-encompassing form of oppression and exploitation in South Africa, known as apartheid (Goldberg, 2008; Posel, 1991). This totalising system of subjugation, which depended on various racisms operating in concert – on political, structural, material, sociocultural and administrative technologies, working in tandem with psychical tendencies – approximated what Foucault (2000) referred to as an apparatus (or dispositif ) in his writings on power. As such an ensemble of elements, of heterogeneous mechanisms functioning at different levels of influence, racism must be understood along the lines of a series of mutually reinforcing articulations. If we are to apprehend the ongoing echoes of apartheid racism – and thereby other forms of racism in different international locales – we must view its over-determined historical, material, symbolic and structural bases alongside psychological operations, such as the inferiorisation, exclusion and negation of others.

This poses a conceptual challenge, namely, the need to view racism as grounded as much in psychological as in macro-political processes, as existing in both concrete material arrangements and fantasmatic dispositions and as perpetuated as much in (inter)subjective as in institutional domains. The anti-racist project, be it in the peripheral post-colonies or in social formations at the centre of the global economy, is thus made all the more difficult. As a sociopolitical and psychical apparatus, racism proves notoriously recalcitrant and difficult to shift, precisely because a challenge to any one aspect of its system, as in the case of a change to prevailing discursive norms, can be absorbed by compensatory processes elsewhere in the system, as is apparent, for example, in the continuation of racialised poverty in a country such as South Africa (Gibson, 2011).

The psychological dimensions of racialised histories

Given that a series of political, socio-symbolic and institutional changes have occurred in contemporary South Africa, one is left questioning whether the psychical impact, the psychological dimensions of apartheid and its history, has yet been adequately addressed. Again, we confront an issue of pertinence to a variety of global contexts in which the difficult task of retrieving repressed racist histories remains an ongoing imperative (see e.g. Rüsen, cited in Villa-Vicencio, 2004, for similar experiences in post-World War II Europe). Here we should ask: have these histories been adequately exorcised; have the forgotten, repressed or marginalised memories of these times and the multiple forms of social asymmetry associated with them been properly taken into account; and if indeed they can be accessed, what can they reveal about the psychological dimensions of apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa? This is not to say that the psychological dimensions of apartheid have not been theorised.

Certainly, writers such as Biko (2004) engaged deeply with the psychology of racist oppression, alongside others such as Manganyi (1973), who also wrote eloquently on the psychology of blackness in apartheid South Africa. Of course, we also recognise the differently oriented work in social psychology that examined intergroup relations during apartheid and in post-apartheid South Africa (see e.g. Durrheim & Dixon, 2005; Foster & Louw-Potgieter, 1991), as well as the plethora of discursive studies examining racism as related to signification (see e.g. Duncan et al., 2002).

However, recent research and theorising on the legacy of apartheid racism has been conducted more widely from the vantage point of cultural studies and post-colonial theory. Illustratively, Gibson’s (2011) text on the relevance of Fanon’s writings to contemporary South Africa reveals ways of deploying Fanon’s analytic methods to understanding, for example, the activities of new nationalist comprador elites after revolutionary moments have passed, organic social movements that resist ongoing forms of racialisation and marginalisation, deliberate activism in the service of transformative psychosocial and material practices in contexts of contemporary oppression and the new sociocultural possibilities that present themselves in post-colonial social formations (for the latter, see Mbembe, 2001; Nuttall, 2009). Overtly psychological works on racism and its legacy in post-apartheid South Africa, however, are not extensively represented in the literature (see e.g. Hook, 2012; Stevens, Franchi & Swart, 2006).

Revisiting the psychosocial

Frosh (2010) offers some new possibilities for thinking about racism and its psychological dimensions when he revisits the idea of the psychosocial. He speaks of psychosocial studies as concerned with the interplay between what are typically understood as external social and internal psychic formations. He is aware, of course, that such a discipline thereby problematises the dualism or simplistic division of inner and outer. As Saville-Young (2011) notes, a psychosocial framework questions the traditional division of the personal and the social, undermining notions of an inner reality (the psyche) and an outer reality (the social) and arguing instead for a psychosocial zone where the social and the psychological are both involved in the simultaneous and ongoing construction of one another.

Of course, the construct of the psychosocial is by no means new within psychology, but it is often the tendency within a field to prioritise the newest developments and trends. In psychosocial studies, this is perhaps the case in respect of the recent ‘affective turn’, and in view of revised engagements with a broadening array of psychoanalytic theorisations. Vital as such a forward momentum is, it sometimes runs the risk of underplaying crucial precursors within the broader discipline of psychosocial studies. In our approach to the psychosocial, we have attempted to remain alive to a variety of vital antecedents within the field that have propelled the discipline and its ability to grapple with the vicissitudes of power in the South African context. Erikson’s (1993) seminal work on human development, for instance, foregrounded a psychosocial understanding that suggested that psychological development, maladjustment and functioning were all generated in relation to, and interaction with, the social environment. This turn towards the social world in ego psychology was later also appropriated and incorporated into much of what we today consider to be psychosocial interventioning within community psychology and liberation psychology (see Sonn, Stevens & Duncan, this volume). Later still, the psychosocial was implicitly reflected in theorising on the relationship between the social world and language, and the manner in which language was not only reproductive but also resistant in relation to this social world (see, for example, the work on race talk by Wetherell & Potter, 1992). Even later, the turn towards discourse focused on the relationship between the social world and the manner in which meaning-making and subjectification as psychological exercises and processes were mediated, thereby imbuing the psychosocial with yet another set of potential meanings (see Parker, 1992).

Our approach in this volume has not been to privilege particular ways of thinking about the psychosocial, but to accommodate a range of conceptualisations thereof. We have adopted an inclusive stance; the psychosocial here is a ‘broad church’, constituting a variety of concepts and methodologies drawn from critical psychology, liberation psychology, sociology and social theory more generally. This being said, the disciplinary formation of psychosocial studies in the South African context has, historically, drawn predominantly on critical psychological theorisation. This feature of our approach means, perhaps inevitably, that we cannot claim to have utilised the full range of disciplinary resources that may be seen to inform psychosocial studies in other global contexts. However, one evident bridge to other contemporary forms of psychosocial studies is worth briefly noting here, namely, an emphasis on the psychoanalytic conceptualisation of the irrational, affective and unconscious dimensions of psychosocial phenomena. This features in roughly one third of the book’s chapters. While our perspective on the psychosocial does not immediately prioritise the role of such psychoanalytic engagements, they do play a significant role in the broader approach that we advance here.

An abiding characteristic of psychosocial studies is its tendency to look beyond the immediate purview of any one discipline, to prioritise interdisciplinary theories and methodologies. The opportunities afforded by a psychosocial approach to the analysis of racism and associated forms of social asymmetry are thus apparent in addressing and analysing its over-determined nature. The combination of theoretical registers enabled in this way allows scholars to conduct multiple and overlapping forms of analyses, such that we may appreciate how ‘social forces become inextricably bound up with the subjective experience of individuals, which in turn contribute to their perpetuation’ (Frosh, 1989, p. 210).

As is perhaps now clear, psychosocial studies for us has less to do with an allegiance to a given set of theories and methods; it is concerned more fundamentally with the type of conceptual and critical work a piece of research enables, and with how a number of approaches and theories may be combined in helping us understand the interface between structural and psychical constituents in the productions of ‘race’, racism and aligned forms of racialised power and oppression. Furthermore, given that the work which follows has a strong collaborative dimension – chapters were developed from materials presented at a series of conferences held in South Africa between 2009 and 2011 on the Apartheid Archive Project – we may also qualify our approach to the psychosocial as collective, indeed, as composite, made up of a variety of converging methods and disciplinary perspectives. This volume thus presents the findings from the initial phases of the project’s work, phases that deliberately sought in-depth, multiperspectival analyses of a relatively narrow range of material. The psychosocial here, in other words, often emerges precisely in terms of overlaying different critical lenses and conceptualisations of the same data set. We have been less concerned with ensuring that each component study is definitely psychosocial than with the resultant mosaic of approaches which progressively, cumulatively, implies a complex view of the psychosocial. Our objectives here are not meta-theoretical, and as such we make no claim to resolve evident contradictions and tensions between the approaches that appear in this mosaic or that make it appear ‘whole’. Our objectives are pragmatically and politically led; the volume draws attention to the potential strengths of a multidimensional account of racism and apartheid and underlies the need to approach the psychosocial in such terms.

The vernacular of the psychosocial thus understood allows us to shed light not only on the psychical mechanisms of racism but also on how these mechanisms become intertwined with a series of unexpected referential correlates, such as the production of gender and sexuality, the coherence of family structure, and the workings of memory and narrative in the formation of social subjects, to cite just a few examples from the chapters that follow. Understanding these articulations – how racism and its effects persist in places and ways we may not initially have expected – will prove central to any project of social justice, to any viable future beyond the strictures of formal apartheid history.

One additional point should be emphasised. While the dimension of political change is an implicit consideration within most empirically focused psychosocial research (Frosh, 2005; Squire, 2007; Wetherell & Potter, 1992), it is worth stressing that it is an absolutely central factor in the approach we adopt here. A potential critique of the notion of the psychosocial as it is currently utilised is that it does not prioritise strongly enough the agenda of ongoing social transformation. For us, therefore, the psychosocial must always necessarily be equally understood as the psycho-political. This enables us to foreground another particular contribution we aim to make to psychosocial studies with this book. Our objective is to extend and develop the often latent political dimension of the discipline, to connect it to a precise and grounded historical context and to link it to a project of anti-racist political change.

It is of course for this reason that we insist on the notion of psychosocial praxis. We draw here on Gramsci’s (1971) concept so as to point to the solidarity-forming consciousness of lived social contradictions that we view as essential to the Apartheid Archive Project’s agenda of political analysis. In outlining the concept in Prison Notebooks, Gramsci (1971) reiterates the role of the philosopher, understood ‘both individually and as an entire social group’ (p. 405), in grasping social contradictions. More than this, the advocate of praxis posits him or herself ‘as an element of the contradiction and elevates this element to a principle of knowledge and therefore action’ (p. 405).

Freire (2000) further notes that praxis is not merely about suspending preconceived notions that are related to social action, but is also fundamentally social action that is critically informed and premised on experiential knowledge of the world, dialogue, and critical reflection and is ultimately guided by the values of social transformation. This approach resonates strongly with the values underpinning both community psychology and liberation psychology praxis today – understanding communities’ experiential histories and locatedness, deconstructing and de-ideologising these experiences in a dialogical process and acting critically to disrupt power and privilege (Fine, 2006; Martín-Baró, 1994; Sonn, Stevens & Duncan, this volume). Self-critique, knowledge production and social action all come together here in a model of political psychosociality that we attempt to extend in various ways in the chapters that follow.

The Apartheid Archive Project

Having outlined the disciplinary context of the book, we now turn to its substantive content and methodological foci, namely that of the Apartheid Archive Project itself. This is perhaps best done by citing the original research document setting out the aims of the Apartheid Archive Project (2010):

Sixteen years ago the curtain was finally drawn on the system of institutionalised racism that the world knew as apartheid, and the memorial signifiers of its demise are writ large on South Africa’s public landscape. Yet, its pernicious effects on our inner-worlds; on memory, identity and subjectivity, continue to constrain the promises of a truly post-apartheid South Africa. Trapped by a national desire to look forward rather than to the past, the everyday personal accounts of the scourge of apartheid are rapidly fading into a forgotten past … Given South Africa’s apparent self-imposed, and in certain respects, carefully managed, amnesia about the apartheid era … as well as its blindness to the ongoing impact today of institutionalised apartheid racism … on inter-group and inter-personal relationships, we believe that it is important to re-open the doors to the past … [This project] will attempt to foreground narratives of the everyday experiences of ‘ordinary’ South Africans during the apartheid era, rather than simply focusing on the ‘grand’ narratives of the past or the privileged narratives of academic, political and social elites … Based, in part, on the assumption that traumatic experiences from the past will constantly attempt to re-inscribe themselves (often in masked form) in the present if they are not acknowledged and dealt with, this project aims to examine the nature of the experiences of racism of (particularly ‘ordinary’) South Africans under the old apartheid order and their continuing effects on individual and group functioning in contemporary South Africa.

Stated in the simplest terms, the Apartheid Archive Project is an ongoing collaborative research project that focuses on the collection of personal stories and narrative accounts from ordinary South Africans, about their experiences of racism during apartheid. Initiated in 2008 by two psychologists at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, the project continues to be housed at, and primarily funded by, this institution. One of the primary aims of this initiative is to provide an opportunity or forum to different sectors of South African society (but particularly marginalised groups, such as the poor and the still politically, socially and economically marginalised, whose life stories are rarely incorporated into dominant historical accounts of the past) to reflect on and share their past experiences (cf. Nora, 1989). These narratives, it is hoped, will offer us an array of alternative entry points into the past, in addition to the accounts of historians and other scholars. Indeed, as Nora (1989, p. 12) observes, narratives such as these serve as an important antidote to the ‘deforming, … petrifying’ effects of dominant (homogenising) formalised histories.

Another vital part of the initiative is to consider the ongoing effects and attributable meanings of the experiences related in the collected stories and narratives, in present-day South Africa. Crucially, the project aspires not merely to record these accounts – in itself an important act of remembering different histories – but also to engage thoughtfully and theoretically with them. In these ways the Apartheid Archive Project encourages both a commitment to personal and collective remembering and a joint intellectual and political commitment to interrogating stories and narratives rather than simply accepting them at face-value.

The collected narratives, stories and related project materials are all currently stored in the Historical Papers section of the Cullen Library at the University of the Witwatersrand, and are also electronically available to the broader public at http://www.historicalpapers.wits.ac.za/?inventory/U/collections&c=AG3275/R/9023. Importantly, while the Apartheid Archive Project has begun to generate its own archive of narratives and stories – to which many of the empirically driven chapters in this volume speak directly – we envisage that the project may very well extend its analytic gaze to existing and related archives in the future as well (see Ratele & Laubscher, this volume).

An intellectual and political cornerstone of the project is to contribute to a form of critical psychosocial mnemonics (see Sonn, Stevens & Duncan, this volume). While conceivably falling within the broad field of memory studies, critical psychosocial mnemonics is interested in engaging with those mechanisms and processes that facilitate individual and collective remembering (e.g. storytelling); how these memories ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. The Apartheid Archive Project, the Psychosocial and Political Praxis
• Introduction to Part II: Whiteness, Blackness and the Diasporic Other
• Introduction to Part III: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Archive
• Introduction to Part IV: Method in the Archive
• Appendix A: Narrator Details and Corpus of Narratives Examined in This Volume (N=48)
• Master Reference List
• Index