1.18. (Post)colonial Responsibilitiy & Intergenerational Memories

During the early 1990s, South Africa was part of a broader wave of countries that “transitioned” to democracy. In contrast to earlier visions of a radically transformed order, it adopted a liberal democracy grounded in constitutionalism and human rights. This political moment was marked by escalating violence, as different actors struggled over territory and power. For many communities, these conflicts became entangled with older memories of repression and dispossession, producing layered and recursive memories of violence and loss. After 1994, transitional justice mechanisms such as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) sought to reckon with the past and foster reconciliation. Yet, the TRC’s linear framing of transition — a “closing of the door,” as Desmond Tutu phrased it — has been widely critiqued for foreclosing the continuing presence of the past. It also obscures the legacy of structural violence inherited from colonialism and apartheid by focussing on individual acts of violence. This paper asks how visual storytelling and performative art can open alternative spaces as living archives of violence in post apartheid South Africa. It explores how art as memory work allows us to conceptualise time as cyclical rather than linear, recognising, as Saidiya Hartman reminds us, that “the past has yet to be done.” Drawing on Assmann’s notion of communicative memory, the paper argues that art functions as a living form of remembrance that moves beyond representation to expose how violence continues to challenge the democratic present. Methodologically, the paper combines insights from critical archival studies, visual and cultural analysis and oral history to examine how artistic practices engage with, and at times contest, other forms of collective memory — including official memorials, landmarks, and material objects. In doing so, it reconsiders how belonging and identity within a democratic order are continuously negotiated through memory.

My presentation of memory, art and activism explores how a younger generation of artist-activists make sense of the past and reframe colonialism remembrance in postcolonial Namibia. I argue that their practices unsettle the intergenerational transmission of memory and confront the dogmatism of (previously) powerfully univocal postcolonial hegemony of remembrance. They embrace future-orientation and articulate ancestral memory through embodiment and deep history. Namibia’s decolonial artist-activists call for inclusivity in society. They demand that Namibian society should espouse full equality and undertake radical reconfigurations of institutions and citizenship and challenge the country’s society and politics’ authoritarian features. Drawing from arts-based field research, I demonstrate that through performance, and embodied art practices, artist-activists subvert the dogmatism of state-sanctioned memorialization, undemocratic and exclusionary narratives. Their practices contrast the politics and aesthetics of the postcolonial state’s master narrative, as fixed in postcolonial memorial sites, designed to facilitate the preservation of particular interpretations of the past. In Namibia’s official memorialization historical ‘truths’ are regularly rehearsed as formulaic narratives and the celebration of the armed struggle from exile as the foundation of national liberation. Calling their activism “intersectional”, a new generation practise activist embodied art that connect decolonising the public space and confronting the enduring structural violence of coloniality: poverty and the lack of meaningful land restitution, gender-based violence, and state-sponsored homophobia. They envisage a decolonised Namibia, which is ordered differently to the hierarchies which have been inherited from colonial legacies: authoritarianism within the formally democratic dispensation, state-sponsored heteronormativity, and a lack of women’s autonomy over their bodies. The Namibian practices challenge memory studies to reconsider transnational and transgenerational future-oriented memory work through the lens of decolonial art-based interventions, in Africa, and beyond.

What can be done when your collective memories have been stolen? When you have no language to pass on to the next generations? In this presentation, I will draw on my interdisciplinary research on performative translation (Canalès 2021, 2022) to study memory making and memory transmission through arts in today’s neocolonial Canadian context. I will base my demonstration on the making of Wolastoqiyik Lintuwakonawa (2018), Wolastoqey artist Jeremy Dutcher’s debut album. Dutcher, on the advice of Elder Maggie Paul, found audio archive engraved on wax rolls by an anthropologist at the beginning of the 20th century. It took him five years to salvage these forgotten memories and incorporate them in a contemporary, pop and operatic music album recorded and marketed entirely in the wolastoqey language-that was at the time spoken by a few dozens of elders only. Through Dutcher’s transformative process, we will see how lost memories can be unearthed, transformed, translated through performance, and ultimately, in Dutcher’s words, “rematriated” (given back to a community, out of Western patriarchal norms), and how this process lets emerge new “cultural memories” (Assmann 2008). Such performative translations hold the power to shift the dynamics between memories and oblivion; they affect historical narrative transmission (Ricoeur 2000), and they attempt to rewrite history, herstory, theirstory, and ourstory. Dutcher’s album’s global success shows us that such initiatives engage the public on an emotional level that transcends borders, making Dutcher a prominent agent of the ongoing Indigenous Renaissance. From a scholarly point of view, they challenge traditional notions of text, knowledge, translation and memory transmission. They make us consider the study of translation in terms of unchartered territories and not existing maps (Sánchez 2017), which is as exciting as it is uncomfortable and calls for new transdisciplinary conversations.

Analysing, White Chrysanthemum (2018) by Mary Lynn Bracht and The Island of Sea Women (2020) by Lisa See from the perspective of Hauntology (Derrida 1994) and Biopolitics (Foucault 2003) the article examines them as sites of mnemonic responsibility and addresses the gendered perspective of state sanctioned violence (Nae 2021, p.86). Drawing from the novels, the article describes gendered and colonial violence (Myadar & Davidson 2020, p.2) experienced by haenyeos through testimonies and stories suppressed in the aftermath of the Sasam or Jeju Uprising of 1948 (Cheju Commission 2003). The selected works portray the complexities of silence, segregation and forced erasure of marginalized voices on the cultural memory of the Jeju’s history. As agents of resistance and memory, femimemory challenges the actions of the patriarchal and national structures (Stanley 2022, p.179). Derrida’s framework of hauntology (Derrida 1994) addresses the spectral presence that haunts the landscape of Jeju, biopolitics (Foucault 2003) uncovers the neocolonial regime’s legacy of sexual trauma inflicted on women’s bodies and Marianne’s Hirsch’s (2012) arguments on postmemory describes the intergenerational burden of silenced trauma experienced by Jeju inhabitants. The period of Jeju Uprising which started from 1 March 1947 and extended over to 21 September 1954 (Nae 2021) is displayed through the haenyeos in the novels, which perform the important role of narrating, witnessing and preserving silenced histories (Jilani 2021, p.13) through literature. This article will also address the multi level structural methods of silence imposed by the anti communist regimes and the transitional justice carried out by the following governments, agencies and organisations in order to overcome the past (Koh 2016). It also depicts resistance and reparative justice demonstrated by the Jeju Peace Foundation through actions like organisations of commemorative events, collection of testimonies, creating archives and many more to provides agency to the survivors and safeguard

The global dialogue surrounding diasporic memory and democratic accountability remains profoundly incomplete when confronting the intentional erasure of marginalized lives. While scholarship often addresses the transatlantic slave trade and its aftermath, the specific history of Afro-Brazilian return migration to West Africa in the 18th and 19th centuries is frequently reduced to narratives focused solely on elite families (e.g., those who established prominence or were privileged with education). This approach overlooks the vast majority of returnees, whose stories were structurally silenced by the wholesale destruction of slavery-related documentation in Brazil, alongside the illiteracy that prevented them from authoring their own history. This paper introduces the research-creation project, Ancestral Mist, which intervenes in this historical gap by launching a deliberate effort to recover these absent voices. The project, which blends scholarly inquiry with artistic practice, centers on the life of Antonio Quaétano, an Afro-Brazilian returnee and non-elite ancestor of the author, to develop a robust, ancestor-focused methodology for excavating memory from silence. To reconstruct this lost lived experience, the project examines a fragmented archive of missionary records like that of Reverend Father Isidore Pélofy’s notebooks, colonial administrative documents, and genealogical data. It then employs critical fabulation (Hartman, 2007), a necessary speculative narrative technique, to ethically fill the profound gaps and omissions created by systemic anti-Black erasure. We argue that the recovery of these non-elite narratives, grounded in an interdisciplinary methodology that blends archival inquiry with artistic interpretation, constitutes a vital form of memory activism. This work challenges the inherited, undemocratic historical record by demonstrating how displaced communities actively reconstruct identity and agency, transforming structural silence into a foundation for pluralistic diasporic memory. The ultimate output, the Digital Imaginarium, serves as a compelling model for making marginalized ancestral memory accessible, participatory, and resilient.