The afterlife of apartheid: a triadic temporality of trauma

ABSTRACT

This article explores transgenerational dynamics of memory in the individual and collective contexts in contemporary South Africa. By engaging in a conversation informed by psychoanalytic theory between the archive of the public hearings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and narratives of the younger generation of black South Africans, the article offers a conceptual framework for how transgenerational transmission of memory in the lives of descendants of generations of victims of prolonged traumatic subjugation might be explained. A tri-directional perspective in which memory crosses and re-crosses past, present and future temporalities is proposed, and the movement and translation of memory between and across these temporalities are explained and conceptualised as a “triadic” view of memory.

KEYWORDS:

• Triadic memory
• triadic temporality of trauma
• tri-telescopic memory
• transgenerational trauma
• Truth and Reconciliation Commission
• traumatic memory

Acknowledgments

The research for this article was supported by the South African National Research Foundation. I am grateful to the reviewers of this article for their insightful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela

Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela is a professor in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Stellenbosch University, where she holds the South African Research Chairs Initiative (SARChI) in Violent Histories and Transgenerational Trauma. She is also the Director of the Centre for the Study of the Afterlife of Violence and the Reparative Quest.