Hysterical nostalgia in the postcolony: from Coming Home to District 9

Abstract

Much of the remembering of recent years in South Africa has involved nostalgia, but a nostalgia of excess and morbidity, or what might be called hysteria. The endangered body stands as a memorial to the distortions of apartheid, and there are many manifestations in the culture of the country. Here I analyse two performative works by expatriate South Africans who in contrasting but related ways express through them a hysterical-nostalgic relation to their country's past: Coming Home, a memory-play by Athol Fugard, and Neill Blomkamp's dystopian film District 9, both of which touch on the country's HIV/AIDS crisis. Resisting inadmissible yearnings for the apartheid past leads to revealing versions of nostalgia, in terms of broader cultural aesthetics, and the politics of the present – a time of continuing turbulence and uncertainty.

Keywords:

• hysteria
• nostalgia
• memory
• performative
• Freud
• Athol Fugard
• Coming Home
• Neill Blomkamp
• District 9
• Johannesburg
• rural versus urban
• post-apartheid

Notes

1. One of the limitations of Svetlana Boym's dissection of the forms of nostalgia (Boym 2001) is its metropolitan, European focus; but her study remains invaluable, and I have drawn on it here.

2. For a good account of the performative dimension of the TRC, see Cole (2010).

3. Coloureds are a mixed-race people, predominantly in the Cape, who prefer to be thus named.

4. See the detailed account in Coombes (2003, 116–148). Interestingly, a new theatre named after Fugard has been created in the former District Six.

5. See Derrida ([1981] 2004, 98–118).