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Periodical article Periodical article Leiden University catalogue Leiden University catalogue WorldCat catalogue WorldCat
Title:Behind Telling: Post-Apartheid Representations of Robben Island's Past
Author:Riouful, VeroniqueISNI
Year:2000
Periodical:Kronos: Journal of Cape History
Issue:26
Pages:22-41
Language:English
Geographic term:South Africa
Subjects:national liberation movements
prisons
historiography
Urbanization and Migration
Law, Human Rights and Violence
History and Exploration
Peoples of Africa (Ethnic Groups)
Ethnic and Race Relations
External link:https://www.jstor.org/stable/41056408
Abstract:With the advent of the 'new' postapartheid South Africa, the representation of the past has undergone a dramatic reshaping in congruence with the new project of a democratic and reconciled nation. The current commemoration of Robben Island, symbolic acme of the regime's oppression and of the resistance movement under apartheid, epitomizes this ongoing reshaping of the past, aimed at soothing divisions and frustrations and at celebrating the present and the new dispensation. It further illustrates the power and significance of discourse and social representation in societal transformations, and the deliberate undertaking of the new South African elites to act upon them to that end. This article deconstructs and analyses the forms and contents of the new public representation of Robben Island and their shaping factors and subtexts, as well as 'what it means to them to have appeared when and where they did - they and no others'. The article relates what is being told with what, in the very process of telling, is being marginalized, silenced and recast. It thus highlights that examining what is 'not told' does not only consist in uncovering lies and secrecy, but also in analysing what is merely being left out in the narration and why. Notes, ref.
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