Hauntology, history and heritage

Abstract

This chapter uses Jacques Derrida’s notion of hauntology, which has been put to work by posthuman and feminist new materialist authors to examine how social work is always already influenced by the ghosts of dense colonial histories. This chapter shows how apartheid and colonial legacies are in fact seething presences, bleeding into the present and future, whose violences (such as slavery) continue to affect present-day circumstances. The chapter explains how indeterminacy and dis/continuity can be used to explain intergenerational trauma in South Africa caused by colonialism and the institutionalised racism of apartheid. The chapter refers to a study in Cape Town, South Africa, where participatory research was conducted with three generations of family members who were descendants of slaves and had been forcibly removed because of the Group Areas Act apartheid legislation. The findings indicate that disenfranchised grief, silence, socialisation into institutional racism and shame were the main mechanisms by which the historical traumas of slavery and displacement were transmitted within the families. The chapter considers how social work might respond to such hauntologies, where the past is not left behind, but diffracted through the present moment and into the future.