Neoliberalism commodities anti-apartheid history emptied of memory
Evidence
An Afrikaner innkeeper driving us to the Oliver Tambo International Airport in Johannesburg admits to not knowing who Tambo was or why he deserves an international airport in his name (“Why was Jan Smuts not good enough, hey?”). Responding to our explanation that Tambo led the ANC in exile throughout Mandela’s imprisonment, our entrepreneurial Afrikaner chauffeur, bereft of memory, suggests that South Africa should “mine” its rich history of anti-apartheid struggle for tourist commercial appeal, much as Israel has done in the case of Masada. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1611
Categorization
- CANDY: The self-serving Afrikaner chauffeur, ignorant of the very leader whose name names the airport he drives through, proposing to market the anti-apartheid struggle as tourist content is darkly funny and tells a whole story in one vignette.
- XREF: Shows how erstwhile beneficiaries reroute privilege: once-sacralized race beneficiaries become the brokers of its secularized commemoration — a perverse continuity-in-rupture echoing how privileged groups reassert advantage in new registers. — connects to: Apartheid operated not only as a scholarly object but as the medium of scholarship; Apartheid shaped not only what scholars studied but how they studied it — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 549; Spectacular anti-apartheid narratives displaced ordinary black rural life from fiction — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 521
Broader Connections
- Apartheid operated not only as a scholarly object but as the medium of scholarship
#responds-to(0.80) - Apartheid shaped not only what scholars studied but how they studied it
#responds-to(0.80) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 549