Turning up the Volume: Dialogues about Memory Create Oral Histories

Abstract

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.

Keywords:

• Oral histories
• dialogues
• memory
• narrative
• agency
• identity
• visual traces