Memorialising Freedom Struggles
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2008
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Safundi: Journal of South African and American Comparative Studies
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University of Cape Town
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My reading of a set of essays under the title The Civil Rights Movement in American Memory (2006), edited by Renee Romano and Leigh Raiford, leads me to offer some reflections on the different ways in which the civil rights movement in the US south and the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa have been memorialized. Memory is of course a slippery concept, which Romano (Wesleyan) and Raiford (UC Berkeley) at one point choose to define as ‘‘the subjective, selective, and potentially unreliable account of the past told by those outside of the academy and circulated in the media and popular culture.’’1 They do not stick to so narrow a definition, but their concept of memory work excludes the reconstruction of the past by historians and focuses mostly on forms of public remembering.
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Reference:
Saunders, C. (2008). Memorializing freedom struggles. Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies, 9(3), 335-342.