In recent years, South African literature, art, and cultural criticism have been registering the feelings of disappointment, nostalgia, and of a general impasse that signify a crisis of... Show moreIn recent years, South African literature, art, and cultural criticism have been registering the feelings of disappointment, nostalgia, and of a general impasse that signify a crisis of postapartheid imaginations. At the same time, we can observe a turn in cultural production toward reexamining South Africa’s socialist archives and reconnecting them to the present-day predicaments and emerging social movements. Reading these processes in Imraan Coovadia’s latest novel, artworks by Haroon Gunn-Salie, and an exhibition by the Stellenbosch Open Forum, this article argues that they confront the feelings of postapartheid disillusionment by critically re-invoking memories of the 1970–80s socialist practices in South Africa and the transnational frameworks they involved. It argues that these changing approaches to the socialist archives can be read as a decolonial critique, which links the described trends in South African culture to other “post-dependence” (and specifically, post-socialist) contexts worldwide. Show less
![Erinnerung als Waffe der Dekolonialisierung: Kunst und StudentInnen-Bewegung im heutigen Südafrika [Memory as a Weapon of Decolonisation: Art and Student Mobilisation in South Africa Today]](/sites/all/modules/custom/islandora_solr_search/images/defaultimg.png?solr_nav%5Bid%5D=322d0a6aa5a5e3160295&solr_nav%5Bpage%5D=0&solr_nav%5Boffset%5D=2)
