Remembering the Violence of (De)colonization in Southern Africa:From Witnessing to Activist Genealogies in Literature and Film

The histories of Southern African postcolonies which experienced decolonization and political transition during the 1980s and early 1990s are deeply entangled, creating the potential for transnational regional remembrance. However, memories of these periods that celebrate liberation and the formation of postcolonial states have largely been instrumentalized within nationalist imaginaries. Turning to the practices of literature and film in South Africa, Namibia and Zimbabwe, this chapter asks whether we can trace alternative regional memoryscapes that encompass reflections on the violence of decolonization as well as the continuing coloniality, thus involving critiques of mainstream memorialization. The reading engages with critical memory in the novels published at the turn of the millennium and by the authors of the younger, “born free” generation, during the late 2010s. It traces the dynamics of mnemonic frameworks through which the shared historical experiences of colonial and apartheid violence, decolonization and the post-conflict present are mediated. This dynamic involves a shift from practices of witnessing and testifying to the violence of decolonization towards more recent articulations of memory that create activist genealogies of tackling coloniality across the periods of resisting colonialism, anti-apartheid struggle, and the contemporary critique of post-transitional/post-independence politics which are tied in with protest movements. The recent productions create frameworks of embodied (post)memory that focus on structural violence and its longue durée in the postcolony, representing the traumas of decolonization as traumas of coloniality—of the past relations that reproduce themselves in the present. These structures of timelessness, however, also involve a hopeful dimension: they evoke inspiring stories, un-forgetting, and passing on

Reanimating/Resisting Late Soviet Monstrosity:Generational Self-Reflection and Lessons of Responsibility in Alexei Ivanov’s Pischeblok [The Food Unit]

Remembering late socialism through child perspectives in (auto)fictional writing has been a prominent practice in contemporary Russian literature. In particular, the early 1980s focalized by young protagonists have become the subject of three recent novels, by Alexei Ivanov, Shamil’ Idiatullin and Alexander Arkhangelsky. This article closely examines one of these novels, Alexei Ivanov’s Pischeblok [The Food Unit] published in 2016, asking how it articulates the generation that was coming of age during the 1980s and considering the ethical implications of this articulation. The reading approaches this question by examining the genre characteristics of the novel which involve a tension between ‘generatiography’ and fantasy, and between the realist and post-post-modernist modes. It argues that this hybridity of genre and a metamodernist oscillation allow for creating a multilayered representation of the late Soviet as a space of improvisational possibilities involving play with petty monsters as well as of genuine monstrosity embodying the darker side of the Soviet. The article outlines the novel’s generational self-reflection which involves re-familiarizing the readers with the ideals that existed within socialism but were not realized by the generation which internalized state socialism’s monstrous side. At the same time, the return to the moment of struggling with this monstrosity creates an alternative turning point and the possibility of responsibility-taking

Reanimating/Resisting Late Soviet Monstrosity:Generational Self-Reflection and Lessons of Responsibility in Alexei Ivanov’s Pischeblok [The Food Unit]

Remembering late socialism through child perspectives in (auto)fictional writing has been a prominent practice in contemporary Russian literature. In particular, the early 1980s focalized by young protagonists have become the subject of three recent novels, by Alexei Ivanov, Shamil’ Idiatullin and Alexander Arkhangelsky. This article closely examines one of these novels, Alexei Ivanov’s Pischeblok [The Food Unit] published in 2016, asking how it articulates the generation that was coming of age during the 1980s and considering the ethical implications of this articulation. The reading approaches this question by examining the genre characteristics of the novel which involve a tension between ‘generatiography’ and fantasy, and between the realist and post-post-modernist modes. It argues that this hybridity of genre and a metamodernist oscillation allow for creating a multilayered representation of the late Soviet as a space of improvisational possibilities involving play with petty monsters as well as of genuine monstrosity embodying the darker side of the Soviet. The article outlines the novel’s generational self-reflection which involves re-familiarizing the readers with the ideals that existed within socialism but were not realized by the generation which internalized state socialism’s monstrous side. At the same time, the return to the moment of struggling with this monstrosity creates an alternative turning point and the possibility of responsibility-taking

Erinnerung als Waffe der Dekolonisierung: Kunst und Student*innen-Bewegung im heutigen Südafrika

Beim Beobachten derzeitiger Protestbewegungen in der Postkolonie, besonders solchen von Studierenden, die die Ungleichheit auf dem Campus und in Gesellschaften allgemein thematisieren, lässt sich die Rolle der Kunst bei der Sichtbarmachung der verknüpften Formen des Kolonialismus und des Kapitalismus nicht übersehen. Diese Repräsentationen verleihen nicht nur abstrakten Ideen Sichtbarkeit, sie beinhalten zudem auch symbolische Repertoires, um Regime der Kolonialität anzugehen. Indem sie Erinnerungen an Kolonialisierung, Sklaverei und die Ausbeutung billiger Arbeitskräfte wachrufen, machen sie die kolonialen Ursprünge der heutigen sozialen Beziehungen sichtbar. Der Artikel reflektiert den Einsatz der Erinnerung anhand von poetischen und visuellen Praktiken, die 2015 Teil der Bewegungen #RhodesMustFall und #FeesMustFall an der Universität Kapstadt waren. Der Artikel argumentiert, dass heutige Erinnerungspraktiken ähnlich wie in früheren Beispielen von Kunst und Gedichten der Anti-Apartheid-Bewegung ein neues kollektives Narrativ zu erschaffen versuchen – in diesem Fall ein alternatives Erinnern der Transition der 90er Jahre. Allerdings verdeutlicht in diesen Darstellungen die Erinnerung der Kolonialisierung die täglichen Schwierigkeiten, eine Identität auszubilden und Handlungsfähigkeit auszuüben; sie sensibilisieren für die Anstregungen, die beim Ausbilden neuer Identitäten auf den Ruinen der alten unternommen werden müssen.When observing contemporary protest movements in the post-colony, particularly those led by students and addressing issues of equality on campuses and in societies at large, one cannot circumvent the role of art in making visible the interlinking forms of colonialism and capitalism. Not only do artistic representations lend particular visibility to abstract ideas, but they also provide symbolic repertoires for tackling regimes of coloniality. They often do so by evoking memories of colonisation, slavery and the exploitation of cheap labour, revealing the colonial roots of social relations today. Focusing on the poetic and visual practices that were part of the #Rhodes Must Fall and #Fees Must Fall movements at the University of Cape Town during 2015, this article reflects on the uses of memory in such projects. Similarly to the earlier anti-apartheid examples of art and poetry, the paper argues that contemporary memory practices aim to create a new collective narrative - in this case, an alternative memory of the 1990s transition. However, in these performances, the memory of colonisation elucidates the present-day difficulties of forming an identity and exercising agency; it cautions one of the efforts to be invested into forging new collective identities on the ruins of the old

Formations of Feminist Strike:Connecting DiversePractices, Contexts, and Geographies

This introduction to the special issue on Feminist Strike takes up the question of what remains marginalized and overlooked within dominant discourses on contemporary feminist protests. Drawing on experiences of and approaches to feminist refusal that involve questions of labour, we propose the ways in which conceptualizations of feminist strike can be employed as a lens to build a conversation between different practices, scales, and geographies, particularly across postcolonial and postsocialist contexts. Through a reading of Aliki Saragas’s film Strike a Rock (2017) about the women living around the Marikana miners’ settlement in the aftermath of a major strike, we explore how notions of feminist strike can be expanded by situating Black women’s struggles in South Africa within a long tradition of women’s resistance and showing how political resistance is bound to questions of reproductive work. To understand the intersection of postsocialist, post-conflict, and (pre-)Europeanization transformations, we consider the case of a large-scale strike and public demonstrations against the bankruptcy of the Croatian shipyard Uljanik that took place in 2018 and 2019. Our perspectives on the Marikana and the Uljanik strikes show how women in both places practise a politics of refusal and resistance against ruination, violence, and defeat. In the last section, we summarize the contents of the articles that comprise the special issue