Browsing by Subject "memory"

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    Coloured and Black Identities of Residents Forcibly Removed from Blouvlei
    (2008) Kamish, Ammaarah
    The paper seeks to identify the differences in memory between coloured and black residents of Blouvlei from the 1930s to the 1960s. In particular it looks at residents of an area in Retreat, Cape Town that no longer exists, known as Blouvlei. It examines how people's memories of the same period are vastly different owing to their different life experiences and how they relate those stories in the present. Blouvlei was declared a coloured area in the 1960s by the National Party government and therefore black people were forcibly removed from the area. The article aims to highlight the lives of 36 people and their views on life in Blouvlei and the various areas to which they were moved. More generally the paper looks at the importance of race, class and whether race is the determining signifier, or whether it is class that separates groups. It also identifies various times in Blouvlei's history, namely before, during, and after forced removals. The article therefore encompasses issues such as race, class, identity, life and politics in Blouvlei in this period.
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    Memory, Conscience andthe Museum in South Africa: The Old Langa Pass Office and Court
    (2008) Ralphs, Gerard
    The old pass office and court in Langa was a site of apartheid brutality. In its day-to-day workings, the court found thousands of South Africans guilty of ‘crimes’ that were only crimes in the radically unjust society that the apartheid government cultivated. This paper explores how residents from Langa have remembered the site of the old pass office and court through the lens of oral history. In doing so, it asks how the site, now the Langa Museum, may become a space of memory, identity, and political conscience and consciousness in a post-apartheid context. What insight and wisdom lie embedded in Langa residents’ oral histories about the old pass office? And how can oral historians, Langa residents, museum and heritage practitioners, and visitors to Langa access and utilise the transformative narrative power of these site-stories in the shifting contexts of the site as an emergent social history museum? At what point does the old Langa pass office cease to be a dark space of apartheid, and begin to become a space of post-apartheid humanity and creativity? Indeed, can the Langa Museum become a ‘living’ social history museum? What would a transformation of this nature entail for oral history, Cape Town's memory communities, community-based heritage practice, citizenship, and identity in the South African postcolony?
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    Turning up the Volume: Dialogues about Memory Create Oral Histories
    (2008) Field, Sean
    This article sketches an overview of South African oral history since the 1970s and argues that while oral history projects have grown rapidly since 2000, insufficient attention has been given to international debates about memory, myth and subjectivity. It then explores the conception of oral history being constructed by ‘dialogues about memory’, and how this furthers our understanding of narrative, agency and identity formation. This conception also compels us to reflect on the position of the oral historian. The article then argues that ‘traces’, especially the mental imagery evoked during acts of remembrance, have implications for conducting and interpreting oral history dialogues. This is in a context shaped by post-apartheid memory politics and our anxieties over the fragility of memory traces and the urgent desire to record and conserve before these traces are lost. But dialogues about memory continue to creatively produce oral histories in the present.
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    What is a Mind Week 5 - When is it confabulation?
    (2015-08-15) Solms, Mark
    In this video, Professor Mark Solms describes in rich detail the phenomenon of confabulation or misremembering or distorting information and how this human tendency is an essential part of who we are and how our minds work. This is video 4 in Week 4 of the What is a Mind MOOC.