South African Performance and Archives of Memory by Yvette Hutchison (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: South African Performance and Archives of Memory by Yvette Hutchison Gibson Alessandro Cima SOUTH AFRICAN PERFORMANCE AND ARCHIVES OF MEMORY. By Yvette Hutchison. Theatre: Theory–Practice–Performance series. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013; pp. 256. Post-apartheid South Africans renegotiate their apartheid memories through performance and embodied repertoires (protest theatre, folksongs, dances, rituals), as well as through archives (testimonies, monuments, memorials, museum exhibits). This compelling argument underpins Yvette Hutchison’s South African Performance and Archives of Memory. Central to her thesis is nostalgia: physical and psychological exiles “returning to a country they have dreamed about, but do not necessarily recognise” (8). In order to support this idea, Hutchison cites Svetlana Boyim’s The Future of Nostalgia, which describes “a longing for home that no longer exists or has never existed . . . a sentiment of [End Page 639] loss and displacement . . . a romance with one’s own fantasy” (qtd. in Hutchison 8). According to Hutchison, this longing prompts the performative rewriting of dominant apartheid and post-apartheid discourses, such as “Afrikaner nationalism” (99), “the liberation struggle” (123), and “the rainbow nation” (133). Surveying the past twenty years of democracy in the country, she argues persuasively that South Africans foregrounded certain memories and discarded others. Her analysis proceeds methodologically through multidisciplinary readings of public events, such as South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), the South Africa–Mali Timbuktu Manuscript Project, and the 2010 World Cup—theatrical productions that supported or challenged the TRC, as well as memorial sites like Pretoria’s Voortrekker Monument and Freedom Park. The virtue of Hutchison’s approach in her first two chapters is that she evaluates the TRC’s “script” (24) by drawing together Diana Taylor’s archive and repertoire and Catherine Cole’s understanding of the TRC as a site-specific performance. Her first chapter, “The Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Reconfiguring of the Past: Remembering and Forgetting,” views the TRC as “rehearsals of an ideal state of the nation” (36). The second chapter, “Dramatising the Truth and Reconciliation Commission: The Role of Theatre Practitioners in Exploring the Past,” details how the commission required theatre artists to shift from bearing witness to using verbatim testimony (54). In both chapters, Hutchison rightly questions the means by which TRC commissioners chose certain narratives and excluded others. She notes the absence of nonverbal cues, such as sighs and silences, as well as the effect of these embodied repertoires on the archive’s formation. By staging these omitted stories alongside certain narratives from the TRC, theatre artists both critiqued and continued the commission’s mandate. Like Cole, Hutchison passionately advocates for opening the TRC archive (the majority of which remains inaccessible) and allowing such “backstage” (27) moments as unheard victims’ statements and unsuccessful amnesty applications to inform the official narrative. Hutchison’s polyvocal intervention develops in chapter 3, “Staging a Nation: The Voortrekker Monument and Freedom Park.” She contrasts the Voortrekker Monument, a symbol of Afrikaner nationalism, to the newly constructed Freedom Park on the opposite hill. The sites are connected both literally and metaphorically by a winding road. Although much has been written concerning these two sites, Hutchison’s innovative comparison parallels the 1910 Pageant of the Union of South Africa, which performed reconciliation between English and Dutch-speaking South Africans, and the TRC. Similarly, the 1938 Voortrekker Centenary restaged the famed “Great Trek,” bringing local repertoires of Afrikaner folksongs and dances into a national narrative of Afrikaner-ness. Hutchison holds this nostalgic “myth of a glorious past” as key to the Afrikaner nationalism that later undergirded apartheid (111). According to her, post-apartheid political actors drew on this nostalgia, emphasizing interdependency among South African identities and histories. She notes that Nelson Mandela compared his own liberation struggle to the Afrikaner resistance to English oppression; he imagined Freedom Park as a site of “symbolic reparations” (129). For Hutchison, the expansive Freedom Park site resists colonial and apartheid memorialization strategies by designating areas for remembrance, cleansing, healing, and decision-making. She acknowledges, however, the paradox of a space that invites all South Africans to consider their interconnectedness from a decidedly black South African perspective. Furthermore, the fractious debate over excluding South African Defence Force soldiers from the...