Abstract
Since the first democratic elections in 1994, South Africa has faced the challenge of creating new cultural capital to replace old racist paradigms, and monuments and museums have been deployed as part of this agenda of transformation. Monuments have been inscribed with new meanings, and acquisition and collecting policies have changed at existing museums to embrace a wider definition of culture. In addition, a series of new museums, often with a memorial purpose, has provided opportunities to acknowledge previously marginalized histories, and honor those who opposed apartheid, many of whom died in the Struggle. Lacking extensive collections, these museums have relied on innovative concepts, not only the use of audio-visual materials, but also the metaphoric deployment of sites and the architecture itself, to create affective audience experiences and recount South Africa’s tragic history under apartheid.
Highlights
This paper considers some of the problems to be faced in the arena of culture when a country undergoes massive political change that involves a shift of power from one cultural group to another, taking South Africa as a case study
A demanding task under any circumstances, this is made all the more difficult in the South African context because it is not considered important by those still struggling with basic issues of survival, who may resent the deployment of resources for what seem to be intangible results
Perhaps stimulated by the work of artists who critiqued apartheid oppression, art galleries led the way in revising museum culture, as some enlightened curators started shifting the focus of collections, and mounted exhibitions that began to redress the omissions of South African art history from the 1980s
Summary
This paper considers some of the problems to be faced in the arena of culture when a country undergoes massive political change that involves a shift of power from one cultural group to another, taking South Africa as a case study. A challenge that equals the redistribution of wealth is the need to transfer cultural capital to give recognition to those who were long marginalized. It is critical that racist readings of culture, deeply embedded in the country’s recorded history, should be reshaped if South Africa is to reformulate its long established social hierarchies, which privileged white culture to a degree that almost entirely erased black values. In attempts to recover the history of black culture in South Africa, scholars have been energetically engaged in researching the past anew, a process initiated by liberal scholars long before the demise of the apartheid state; but their writings tend to target a limited readership. To reach wider audiences, reshaping the visual histories recorded in public monuments and museums may be a more accessible form of redress
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