Memory and amnesia after apartheid -- The power of collective memory -- White lies : myth-making and social memory in the service of white minority rule -- Facing backward, looking forward : the politics of remembering and forgetting -- Collective memory in place : the Voortrekker Monument and the Hector Pieterson Memorial -- Haunted heritage : visual display at District Six and Robben Island -- Makeshift memorials : marking time with vernacular remembrance -- Textual memories : autobiographical writing at a time of uncertainty -- Epilogue : history and heritage
Summary
When the past is painful, as riddled with violence and injustice as it is in postapartheid South Africa, remembrance presents a problem at once practical and ethical: how much of the past to preserve and recollect and how much to erase and forget if the new nation is to ever unify and move forward? The new South Africa's confrontation of this dilemma is the subject of this book. More broadly, this book explores how collective memory works-how framing events, persons, and places worthy of recognition and honor entails a selective appropriation of the past, not a mastery of history
