Collective Trauma in Modern Afrikaans Fiction

Cilliers van den Berg

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Collective Trauma in Modern Afrikaans Fiction

于Traumatic Imprints: Performance, Art, Literature and Theoretical Practice

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Cilliers van den Berg

Cilliers van den Berg
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类型:: 章节

Page Range:: 165–173

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1163/9781848880856_019

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The pre-1994 cultural and socio-political history of South Africa has been widely described as a collective trauma. Not only its long colonial history, but especially twentieth century apartheid is till today seen as a socio-political trauma which is often schematically represented in terms of clearly identifiable victims and perpetrators, that is in terms of race. The Truth and Reconciliation Committee, set up in 1995 with Archbishop Desmond Tutu as chairman, has been instrumental in setting the tone for the cultural discourse on this trauma. Since the first democratic elections in 1994, literature written in Afrikaans has been in the difficult position of confronting this traumatic past. The most difficult aspect for the Afrikaans writer was, and still is, the moral implications of writing from the position of the perpetrator, at least this would be the set role allocated to him within the South African literary scene. The aim of this chapter is to investigate how this collective trauma has been, and still is, represented in modern Afrikaans literature, especially in recent times. It becomes especially interesting because the position of the ‘Afrikaner’ within modern South African society often is seen as marginalised, which in effect again produces a traumatic effect: the loss of power, the loss of identity and the loss of land. The question to be answered is whether the notion of collective trauma includes some kind of a socio-political dynamic which either consciously, or even sub-consciously, can be used in various ways by various groupings within societies marked by historical trauma. Can the loss of Afrikaner identity therefore be perceived as traumatic and in which relation does this question stand with regards to the collective trauma of Apartheid? These questions will be discussed with reference to a few relevant Afrikaans literary texts.

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Traumatic Imprints: Performance, Art, Literature and Theoretical Practice

ISBN:: 9781848880856

出版社:: Brill

印刷出版日期:: 15 Apr 2011

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Classical Studies	Literature and Cultural Studies

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Collective Trauma in Modern Afrikaans Fiction

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Traumatic Imprints: Performance, Art, Literature and Theoretical Practice

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