Spectrality and inter-generational black narratives in South Africa

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper is a consideration of a limited number of social and creative imaginaries and their pivotal and difficult implications for trans-generational reflections, narratives and cultural memory in South Africa. The first part of the paper centres around the role-played by narrative. In black communities, the attempts to envision and elaborate alternative understandings of history were acts of knowledge production that negated imperial and colonial modernity and especially their politics of racial subjection and exclusion. The section concludes with a brief consideration of the hermeneutical challenges that are presented by conventional interpretive approaches to narrative and its political imperatives. Following the underscoring of why narrative matters, the second part of the paper maps out the persistent ways in which alienation is foregrounded as an important constituent of black-senses-of-being, especially in relation to the land, the means of life, kin, space and the social-formation. The discussion concludes with a consideration of some key challenges that the calls for transformation and decolonisation present for the processes of knowledge production, narration and interpretation.