Cultural trauma,becomings and decolonial identity-making: A commentary on Verbuyst's ‘Authenticity and decolonisation…’

Abstract

In response to Verbuyst's engaging piece characterising subversive authenticity, this commentary reflects on the multi-layered articulations of authenticity that the author presents and the roles these representations play in defining cultural, ethnic and decolonial identities. In particular, I draw in part on my own research into the multiple characterisations of authenticity (affective, epistemic and reciprocal) amongst anti-racist activists who described themselves as developing their racial identities during the black lives matter movements of 2020. Using theories of becoming and a deeper discussion of trauma and cultural trauma in particular, this commentary looks to explore the semantics of subversion and the persistence of verisimilitude albeit in pluralised forms. Theories of becoming and the use of material culture to support identity affirmations in motion from cultural trauma might contribute to our understanding of the workings of authenticity in this context. As such, I reflect on the concept of subversion as an element of becoming. Subversive authenticity when understood through a lens of cultural trauma is a useful signifier for decolonial identity construction and the assertion that authenticity expressed in this way is an act of agency and of ‘seizing self-representation’.

The ethnographic case of the Khoisan ‘revivalists’ the author describes to formulate arguments about ‘subversive authenticity’ reflects persistent racialised tensions within South African society and the overhanging shadows of colonial trauma and the representations of ethnic ‘indigeneity’. From notions of authentic languages to the mobilisation of cultural artefacts such as bows and arrows or animal skins are used by contemporary urban Khoisan revivalists to denote an affiliation and genealogical connection to an ‘authentic’ hunter–gatherer way of life. The argument that is largely put forward by the author is that ‘authenticity is in the eye of the beholder’. In this view, the author describes a series of ethnographic cases that denote the ways in which something that is considered inaccurate may indeed still be regarded as authentic and what is seen as accurate may nevertheless be deemed inauthentic (Verbuyst, 2025: 8). For example, the case of Bradley Van Sitters, a prominent Khoisan revivalist's, speech delivered in Khoekhoegowab which is a click language of Namibia, Botswana and South Africa. There was some controversy around his mispronunciation and inaccurate use of the language that questioned his authenticity. His response and the defence of his use of the language from a well-known local intellectual made the case that his mistakes made him more authentic rather than less so because he was embracing the ‘scars of the past’ (Verbuyst, 2025: 9). This implied that the disconnection from their heritage brought on by colonialism is represented in the speech errors and the attempts to formulate a new, and what we might call, ‘decolonial dialect’. The author also notes how other scholars interested in the language such as Brown and Deumert (2017) have highlighted how the revivalists use of Khoekhoegowab is one of celebration rather than of policing its linguistic boundaries. In this regard, it is performative, expressive of cultural identity unbounded by accuracy but still with verisimilitude. Verbuyst then proposes that this more fluid adoption and adaptation of cultural motifs is a form of what they call ‘subversive authenticity’.

The idea of subversion when applied to de- or post-colonial identity or community construction is not new. In fact, the idea of subversion has been applied historically in a variety of ways to define culturally loaded acts, expressions and representations that counter hegemonic dominant ideologies, structures or discourses more broadly. For example, from youth subculture such as Teddy Boys, Punks and so on, to the role of parody in Caribbean Carnival (Hall and Jefferson, 2006; Hebdige, 1979 on youth subculture; Bakhtin, 1968; Farrar, 2019; Riggio, 2004 on carnival). The problem is that labelling them subversive is holding still that tension between that which is regarded as ‘normative’, ‘accurate’, ‘valid’ and something else which is the inversion of those things (invalid, abnormal, inaccurate). As such, the author is expressing that persistent dilemma about the workings of power that echo through from Howard Becker's (1963) ‘Outsiders’. The social expressions of the Khoisan interlocutors are persistently being measured against some ‘authentic reality’ rather than be seen as part of a reclamation process. The danger of prefacing authenticity with subversion is that, like deviance, it is a social construction born from the power of some to label others.

Whilst the author is aware of this tension, the concept of subversion warrants a little more attention when seen in this light. The paper raises interesting questions around what subversion means in relation to authenticity, yet there feels to be a missing piece in the puzzle's theorising and that is the relationship between the enduring elements of settler colonialism and the process of healing that indigenous resurgence aims to achieve. This commentary aims to theorise this missing piece through the lens of cultural trauma and theories of becoming.

The ethnographic examples deployed, and their analysis, do move us away from a simple binary construction that understands subversion as a disruption of a singular colonial or dominant narrative. Instead, the subversion being described operates on multiple levels and within the spaces between the binary. The most comprehensive example of this fluidity is through the words of one interlocutor, Yvette Abrahams, who ‘… reads the obsession with authenticity as a symbol of our oppression’ (Verbuyst, 2025: 10). She goes on to discuss the importance of self-identification and that through self-identification authenticity is whatever you make it, so the animal print clothing in modern fabrics and styles is as authentic as she wants it to be. Her authentic self-identification as Khoisan is, therefore, deeply connected to the social process of becoming Khoisan and that being Khoisan is neither a static and bounded and collectively agreed social fact nor is it a deviation from, or subversion of, some form of independently defined a priori Khoisan identity. Instead, it simply is what it is for her at that time.

Liberal individualisms aside, the echoes of Bakhtin (1968) as well as Becker are evident in the cases presented in the paper because the tension between subversion and authenticity is riddled with an adaptive and generative ambiguity for its agents. As Bakhtin wrote of Caribbean Carnival, so too can we of Khoisan identity – it is unfinished. Its creators operationalise language and material cultural for the purpose of rebirth and reclamation, and of making whole that which has been fragmented, dispersed and actively eliminated.

In our decolonial times in the Northern and Southern Hemisphere, questions around authenticity were resurfaced in the wake of the murder of George Floyd in 2020. To be anti-racist became a positive label to express empathy, sympathy and distress at the endurance of racialised police brutality in white-dominant and colonial-settler societies that were so vividly evidenced. Questions were asked around what being an authentic anti-racist or anti-racist ally looks like and there was a flurry of activity aimed at signalling an expression of that identity. Amongst the black lives matter (BLM) activists I spent time with during the spring and summer of the same year, authenticity as anti-racist was expressed through three mechanisms: the affective, the epistemic and the reciprocal. The permutations and combinations of all of these forms operated often simultaneously for them. As such, it was relevant to discuss the presence of multiple authenticities put in motion towards the becoming of something deemed anti-racist.

Briefly, affective authenticity refers to the emotional processes that underpin and are shaped by the lived experiences of my interlocutors at the time including intersections of race, class, gender, family, age and place. Epistemic authenticity refers to the different ways in which interlocutors sought a deeper understanding of their positionalities and the political implications of their positioning. Finally, reciprocal authenticity refers to the ways in which they have developed mutual relations of recognition that extended outwards beyond the confines of their immediate relationships. These relations developed through the interplay of both the affective and epistemic dimensions of actors’ becomings and the ways in which these dimensions are mutual and so understood by others (Mullard, 2024: 112). These framings of authenticity may sit alongside Verbuyst's subversive authenticity as each speak to processes of cultural and ideological becoming and identity-making, which are not necessarily linear, but are recursive and in constant reignition and reaction to their inverse – cultural denial, racism and anti-nativism.

Whilst the expressions of authenticity I discussed were less in the use of material culture, they were in the use of language, social and interpersonal relations, and shared narratives. One interlocutor second-generation Ghanian, Jeff, when discussing his disconnect from his parents and the language they speak between themselves, he does so with regret and the desire to better understand that part of himself. It was through his engagement in the BLM protests, and accidental reveal to his parents that he had organised them that generated a discussion amongst the family about his Ghanaian roots. These discussions led to Jeff learning of his own family's involvement in the Ghanian liberation movement and his grandfather's role in decolonising Ghana. This combination of the affective, epistemic and reciprocal authentication of his identity and anti-racist becoming led to a deeper connection for Jeff and a personal understanding that he was expressing authenticity in his actions.

Whilst this is a fairly straightforward framing of a process of becoming, authenticity in decolonial and diasporic identity-making is also laden with boundary markers that fix identity to some understanding of a situated cultural past as Verbuyst articulates well in the paper. Scholars of diaspora studies, in particular, heavily critique the way authenticity linked to culture as concept is put to work to define the boundaries of verisimilitude (Abu-Lughod, 1991; Brown, 2005). However, it is hard for it not to. Verbuyst argues, similar to Brown (2005), that culture need not be valorised as authentic for it to be nonetheless indispensable. In fact, it is exactly this point that is made by the Khoisan revivalists in the paper. It is only perhaps the purview of the detached scholar to problematise the coupling of culture and identity. This is because identity for the post-colonial and diasporic is intimately bound to trauma and it is both personal and collective. It is easier perhaps to separate out the two dimensions (culture and identity) when the traumas of colonialism, and associate cultural obliteration, are relegated to the past or not seen as sufficiently endemic in contemporary contexts.

The reclamation and formation of identity however authentic or inauthentic speaks to the wider and in this case, ongoing, struggle for recognition and resource distribution famously discussed by Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth (2003). The last 50 years have seen big shifts in recognition politics and the rise of culture and identity as vehicles through which to mobilise the moral stakes of many social movements and decolonisation is a case in point. For Honneth (1996), recognition is a differentiated concept that includes the acknowledgement of rights and cultural appreciation, and it is directly linked to the fulfilment of self and community. The Khoisan in the paper appears to intentionally couple these elements to lay claims of identity recognition and also in land rights redistribution in a context where their claims are perpetually questioned. The recognition of Khoisan identity is both demanded on a personal level through the words of Yvette Abrahams, but also negotiated and understood as disconnected via the collective traumas of colonialism by Van Sitters and commentators. This tension between the individual and the collective is held in perpetual motion through the circulation and adoption of various cultural and linguistic motifs within the representational field of indigenous identity creation.

My final point of commentary on Verbuyst's paper then, must be about the underlying issue of trauma and the harms of misrecognition and maldistribution and how these concepts may be useful for understanding the question of Khoisan identity-making. In addition, then, to theories of becoming (be them individual or collective), understanding the instrumentalising role of trauma is important to this discussion and not just as a contextual backdrop pertaining to events in the past. To do this requires theorising the relationship between justice and trauma.

Fraser (1996) suggests that justice is two-dimensional whereby recognition and distribution coalesce around the notion of parity of participation. Justice requires social arrangements that permit all (adult) members to interact with one another as peers and this require the distribution of material resources on the one hand and that institutionalised patterns of cultural value express equal respect for all participants and ensure equal opportunity for achieving social esteem on the other (Fraser, 1996:36).

Trauma is the consequence of the denial and either purposive or accidental destruction of these things. For example, experiencing a natural disaster can cause trauma as too can events and actions taken by humans. Unlike, justice or injustice, for example, trauma is multi-dimensional and is temporally recursive as an affect. In the case of the Khoisan revivalists there is not just the traumas of settler-colonialism, designations as ‘coloured’ and apartheid in operation, but there is also an associated cultural trauma that is perpetually present in contemporary South Africa and provides the rationale for the revivalist movement. The Khoisan revivalists in the paper on the one hand collectively feel they have been subjected to a horrendous event that has left an indelible mark on their group, marking their memories and changing their future identity in fundamental and irrevocable ways (the definition of cultural trauma by Alexander, 2004; Alexander et al., 2004). However, those feelings clearly endure and re-emerge because the inequalities of settler-colonialism are still evident. Verbuyst, himself, has previously noted this point in a co-authored paper (Veracini and Verbuyst, 2020). The terms settler and native or indigenous are only meaningful in settler-coloniser contexts and if claims of indigeneity exist there must still be a settler-coloniser power dynamic at play. Whilst many Black South Africans reject the Khoisan revivalist project on the grounds that it uses an identity marker – Khoisan – which is known for its colonial and Eurocentric roots, it remains useful for understanding the contemporary articulations of settler-colonialism in South Africa today (Veracini and Verbuyst, 2020; Rakei, 2021). In earlier work, Verbuyst calls for an appraisal of the dynamics of the dispossession of those considered ‘Coloured’ in South Africa, the condition ‘settler colonialism’ and the healing that is ‘indigenous resurgence’ (Veracini and Verbuyst, 2020: 261). The missing appraisals could then rest in additional theorising of cultural trauma as both collective and individually felt and our understanding of the healing can be deepened through theorising the multiple authenticities at play in the ‘becomings’ of indigenous resurgence.

Contemporary theorising around trauma owes much to Kai Erikson's (1976) ‘Everything in its Path’ account of the devastating flood in a small Appalachian valley, whereby the distinction between collective and individual trauma is sensitively explicated. Within this definition, trauma encapsulates both ‘Enlightenment’ logic about rational collective responses to devastating events and the ‘psychoanalytic’ approaches of individual trauma that are filtered through the unconscious whereby memory of the events become cognitively distorted and repressed as a defence mechanism. Traumatic feelings and perceptions come not only from the originating event but also from the representation of it and of what was lost as a result of the traumatic event itself. Ron Eyerman (2001) explores the notion of cultural trauma in the formation of African American identity. The trauma was slavery, segregation and cultural annihilation, which when seen as a collective memory and form of remembrance that grounded the identity-formation of a people becomes useful for the case of Khoisan revivalists. Unlike, trauma per se, however, cultural trauma is better understood as an instrumentalising process of collective identity construction, a becoming that is unfinished. It is unfinished because the foundation upon which the cultural trauma rests is still present. The murder of George Floyd in 2020 was so impactful because it highlighted, through the viral video clip capturing his death and global BLM response, the continued dispossession and denigration of Americans of African descent and indeed came to represent the endurance of white settler supremacy and systemic racism more broadly.

Subversive authenticity is, then, less to do with verisimilitude, though it is in part to do with that as a process of becoming, it is also to do with highlighting the continued cultural trauma experienced by indigenous communities, however loosely defined. Given this, adding some theorising around becoming, its relationship to cultural trauma and identity creation for the racially and culturally marginalised is useful for understanding the workings of the subversive authenticity described in Verbuyst's (2025) paper.