Desegregating the Past

The Public Life of Memory in the United States and South Africa

Robyn Autry

• Editorial: Columbia University Press
• Año: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780231542517
• Categoría: Social Sciences
• Categoría: Sociology

At the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg, South Africa, visitors confront the past upon arrival. They must decide whether to enter the museum through a door marked "whites" or another marked "non-whites." Inside, along with text, they encounter hanging nooses and other reminders of apartheid-era atrocities. In the United States, museum exhibitions about racial violence and segregation are mostly confined to black history museums, with national history museums sidelining such difficult material. Even the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture is dedicated not to violent histories of racial domination but to a more generalized narrative about black identity and culture. The scale at which violent racial pasts have been incorporated into South African national historical narratives is lacking in the U.S. Desegregating the Past considers why this is the case, tracking the production and display of historical representations of racial pasts at museums in both countries and what it reveals about underlying social anxieties, unsettled emotions, and aspirations surrounding contemporary social fault lines around race.

Robyn Autry consults museum archives, conducts interviews with staff, and recounts the public and private battles fought over the creation and content of history museums. Despite vast differences in the development of South African and U.S. society, Autry finds a common set of ideological, political, economic, and institutional dilemmas arising out of the selective reconstruction of the past. Museums have played a major role in shaping public memory, at times recognizing and at other times blurring the ongoing influence of historical crimes. The narratives museums produce to engage with difficult, violent histories expose present anxieties concerning identity, (mis)recognition, and ongoing conflict.

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MEMORY ENTREPRENEURS

History in the Making

If history is written by the victors, then who revises it? Another set of victors do, those that see themselves as speaking on behalf of the subaltern or those social groups that have been historically excluded or effectively erased from conventional historical accounts. These memory entrepreneurs do more than revise history; they actively create and then popularize it.1 Unlike the memory deviants discussed later, entrepreneurs present themselves as representatives of a reconstituted collective in need of safekeeping. The popularization of their revised or alternative accounts through public cultural sites like museums aids in the conversion of historical narratives into the stuff of collective memory. As the targets of this work, we are meant to personally identify with these narratives as they become part of the public life of memory and group identity. This revisionist crusade is led by those who have the most at stake in cultivating this shared (revised) sense of the past among diverse individuals. We can revise and resubmit any number of interpretations about that past, but who dedicates their time to this and which versions attract the most attention, becoming hegemonic representations of the subaltern? Unpacking these issues requires us to rethink revision as a collective memory enterprise that requires high levels of coordination between multiple social actors.

Indeed, the revision of national histories never occurs spontaneously nor in a vacuum. In South Africa and the United States, it occurred alongside the freedom struggles and within the contours of historiographical innovations. The desire to revise and resubmit history should not be taken for granted nor should the practices used to do so. Revisionists generally frame their work as morally and socially imperative. By interrogating their motivations and interests, the normative underpinnings of revision, like all historical production, become evident. Rather than viewing revisions, even those we are sympathetic toward, as necessary or true, we should be attentive to the selective or subjective nature of revision. Treating it as a corrective that brings us a step closer toward the truth about the past obscures its social construction as much as its group-making aspirations. Because historical revision is a social fact, who does the revising is just as important as the outcome. Indeed, the black history and social history movements should be understood as collective memory projects as they sought to intervene in the public’s historical consciousness by having them identify personally with new or alternative narratives, embracing them as though they were their own. Understanding the wider social context of revision does more than explain how new opportunities to resubmit the past were seized and created by enthusiastic memory boosters. It also illuminates how the push for revisionist accounts traces back to the desire to reconstitute collective identities, so that identity formation becomes the primary vehicle through which histories of violence and conflict are navigated. Taken together, I discuss this work as a form of memory entrepreneurship whereby various civic leaders and progressive historians work not to obliterate history or collective identities as a path toward personal freedom, but to revise them.

In both countries, revised narratives produced by professional historians located within academia preceded efforts to strategically popularize these collective accounts through museums. In South Africa, the social history movement of the 1970s and 1980s radically transformed historical production and eventually became a body of evidence or source of knowledge animating the transformation of established history museums and the creation of new ones during the 1990s and 2000s. In the United States, the development of the black historical scholarship intended to correct distortions and address gaps in mainstream work eventually extended beyond academia. This extension included the theming of black history as a specific type of museum. Despite the more overtly national character of the social history-based revision in South Africa compared to the more racial basis of the black history-based revision in the United States, they are far more similar than not. At the most basic level, race and nation are intrinsically relational and interwoven in both places with each collective identity informing the other. Even more, the revisions in both cases are fundamentally vindicationist, motivated by a deep-seated desire to be recognized by dominant society. This longing is as profound as it is practical in terms of professional recognition and institutional survival.

HISTORICAL CAPITAL

Three years into his presidency, Nelson Mandela reflected on the newly created public holiday Heritage Day as an occasion to commit to transforming national museums. He lambasted established institutions for excluding the majority population and for reproducing racial stereotypes, remarking that “the demeaning portrayal of black people in particular—that is African, Indian, and Coloured people—is painful to recall.”2 During that address, he asked:

Having excluded and marginalised most of our people, is it surprising that our museums and national monuments are often seen as alien spaces? How many of our people have visited the country’s museums? How many have gone to see one of our monuments? In other countries, such places throng with citizens.

Mandela reasoned that “with democracy, we have the opportunity to ensure that our institutions reflect history in a way that respects the heritage of all our citizens.” His comments shine a light on the emotive and transformative power many of us regard museums as possessing or representing, seeing them as statements about social value and worth. His remarks also position museums and public representations of shared culture, identity, and history alongside politics; with political change comes a new stream of narratives to bolster a new national ethos.

While the link between such efforts to reshape memorial landscapes in the United States and South Africa and revisionist historical production is complicated, the intellectual products of progressive historians figure centrally in the public presentation of the past at museums. Radical history arose during a time of massive social unrest in both countries. For many progressive professional historians, it marked a departure from conventional research topics, questions, and methodologies. But we should bear in mind that it did not obliterate them; rather it replaced them with an alternative set. Much of this innovation involved re-creating or supplementing archives with the personal accounts, traditions, and oral histories of people whose presence was less visible or more likely to be distorted or truncated in traditional sources. In this sense, the 1970s ushered in an age when culture and politics intersected with innovations in history-making and memory work. This hybridity grew out of crisis, the crisis of a collective representation that could no longer withstand mounting evidence of social fissures. Progressive historians challenged traditional national or political histories from above by attempting to tell history from below in ways that blurred distinctions between history, oral history, anthropology, and folklore.

Yet, we should understand the grassroots image of their work as aspirational or as branding; revision has been packaged as originating from below when in fact it represents the enterprising activities of a diverse set of intellectual, cultural, and community leaders and professionals. Their ability to influence the historical record was possible only through the accumulation of certain forms of cultural power and capital. In his work on sites of memory, French historian Pierre Nora briefly used the concept of historical capital to characterize how subjugated groups possess “reserves of memory” but have little power to affect the dominant historical record.3 Notwithstanding Nora’s problematic juxtaposition of real and authentic memory against the fabricated or produced histories of modern society, his observation that sociopolitical power is directly linked to sociocultural power is crucial. However, he assumes this power is located within groups rather than individuals. It is not the ordinary person that rewrites history or even necessarily has a desire to do so; it is the memory entrepreneur who capitalizes on this opportunity as they gain access to sociopolitical and cultural spaces and resources.

Although the concept has been overlooked in references to Nora’s work, it is one that social scientists should be especially interested in given its clear implications for the way we discuss social and cultural capital. In Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, political scientist Robert Putnam famously argued that U.S. public life has suffered from diminished social trust and civic engagement since the 1960s.4 According to Putnam, this disengagement or “de-capitalization” has resulted from an array of social transformations related to mass society and technological change. Many have taken issue with his diagnosis and others are less concerned with the apparent unmooring of a fundamentally exclusionary mainstream.5 Indeed, the weakening of certain types of social bonds and elements of public life has created openings for new forms of expression and ways of being. New historical narratives can take shape within these spaces, so that declining historical (or social) capital within some groups can correlate with increasing capital within others.

Access to and deployment of historical capital helps to explain how, why, and when official historical records change in the context of wider social processes like democratization and social movement activity. As society changes, and as the boundaries of nation expand (or contract), so too do the ways national culture, identity, and history are represented. For example, in recent years it has become increasingly unacceptable and taboo to openly embrace racist-nationalist ideologies in U.S. and South African societies; it has also become more difficult to paint portraits of a culturally homogenous collective without risking immense and swift backlash from vast portions of the population rendered invisible or insignificant with access to a variety of social media, another source of historical capital.

All of these aspects of historical capital lead us toward seeing revision through the lens of social power; yet, one need not accept that these revisionist accounts are particularly radical or even especially alternative: they are still preoccupied with the process of arriving at a consensus regarding memory and history. The parties seek consensus on how to best weave histories of differences and conflict into coherent narratives that ultimately celebrate the types of agitation that prompted the revisionist impulse in the first place. In both countries, the desire to locate certain forms of strife in the past and to fix certain expressions of collective life and identity in museum exhibitions parallels the desire to view the forms of affiliation that led to the creation of the museums as part of a past state that prompted the current harmonious postconflict period during which conflict is a foreign country that we visit in museums.

MAKING HISTORY SOCIAL

What makes history social? Why was the social more appealing than the racial to history makers in South Africa compared to the United States? While there was also a robust social history movement in the United States, one with linkages to its South African counterpart, it was not at the forefront of the revisionist work that ended up on display in black history museums. Generally, we think of social history as part of the people’s history movement, emphasizing the linkages between political, economic, and cultural phenomena and processes across time. In apartheid-era South Africa however, it was far more than a reaction to political histories in South Africa. Social historical production became an intellectual endeavor focused on resistance and social change, using grassroots history—history from below—as both an intellectual and cultural front of resistance. Who resides below and what does it mean to tell history from that vantage point relative to some other? These questions have been largely taken for granted by those involved in the revisionist movement of the 1970s and 1980s that would eventually find an outlet in museums. What did it mean to tell history from below? Below what and who would do the telling? How did this radical social history get mainlined as it became hegemonic itself? The nature of its popularization helps explain this—through films, documentaries, public talks, plays, slideshows, newspaper articles, and later museum exhibitions and school curricula.

In the context of colonialism and apartheid it should come as no surprise that the production of historical knowledge has always been a contested site where state practices of domination and exclusion are rationalized, glossed over, or alternatively called into question. Calling history into question—and thus calling the scaffolding of white minority rule into question—became the primary objective of the social history revisionist movement in South Africa, led by English-speaking professional historians. Belinda Bozzoli, one of its early practitioners, describes this reactionary project in terms of fashioning a narrative that resonated with the majority population. Reflecting on the movement, she recalled that

Afrikaner nationalists have constructed elaborate myths of origins and of national progress and redemption [that] have been imposed upon countless schoolchildren of all races.… The dominant ideas, although well thought-out and efficiently promulgated through schools and public media, and backed by a totalitarian state have not found a secure place in the hearts and minds of ordinary blacks.6

Accordingly, many social historians set out not to obliterate history, but to repurpose it in their image of the ordinary and in the service of their various ideological commitments to the working class. These more progressive historians represented a challenge to the established history enterprise, which was dominated by Afrikaans-speaking professionals.7

The ascent of social history as a way of doing history and thinking historically advanced on the heels of a number of intellectual and social turns in South Africa and abroad. Locally, the 1976 Soweto student uprisings marked a moment of heightened protest and challenge to the state, adding urgency to calls for a revised treatment of national culture and history. Drawing on the social history movements in England and to a lesser extent the United States, these liberal historians sought to develop a counterhistory that stood out for its methods as much as its content. As an intellectual project, the South African social history movement reflected the ethos of the Marxist historical thought associated with English scholars like Shula Marks and E. P. Thompson.8 Indeed, many received their degrees and training in England before taking up positions at English-speaking universities, especially at the University of the Witwatersrand (more commonly known as Wits University) in Johannesburg, which would become the epicenter for the revisionist movement after the founding of the History Workshop in 1977. While they emphasized class and class analysis, mimicking their Marxist training abroad, they were more concerned with culture, not as an instrument of the ruling elite but as a source of knowledge and resistance among the dominated.9

This set of concerns led liberal historians to reorient South Afri...