Living through the legacy: the Apartheid Archive Project and the possibilities for psychosocial transformation

Abstract

The Apartheid Archive Project is an ongoing, collaborative research project that focuses on the collection of personal stories and narrative accounts from ordinary South Africans about their experiences of racism during apartheid. The primary aim of this initiative is to provide a forum for differing sectors of South African society to share and reflect on their past experiences, in the hope that these will offer us an array of alternative entry points into the past, in addition to the accounts of historians and other scholars. Crucially, the project aspires not merely to record these accounts—in itself an important act of remembering different histories—but also to engage thoughtfully and theoretically with them. In these ways, the Apartheid Archive Project encourages both a commitment to personal and collective remembering, and a joint intellectual and political commitment to interrogating stories and narratives rather than simply accepting them at face value. An intellectual and political cornerstone of the project is to contribute to a form of critical psychosocial mnemonics. Critical psychosocial mnemonics is interested in engaging with those mechanisms and processes that facilitate individual and collective remembering; how these memories intersect with lived experiences and various histories; what they can temporally reveal about the past, the present and an imagined future; how they reflect and/or construct the psychological and social subject, intersubjectivity and intergroup relations; and how they may allow us to make critical, analytic commentaries about the social world and its psychological inscription.