Unbuttoning, appropriation, reconstruction histories of the past and present

Nuttall, S & Coetzee, C (eds) (1998) Negotiating the past: The making of memory in South Africa. Cape Town: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-571503-9pbk 300 pages.

Abstract

Negotiating the past is a deconstruction of the complex ways in which South Africans understand who they were; and who they are. This identity-quest through memory, as editors, Nuttall and Coetzee argue, defeats an agenda motivated by a simple unbuttoning of "historical truth". Historical unbuttoning, pervasive in early discourse about the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, for example, asserts a linear relationship between "truth", a past which is uncoverable, and "healing·, which is to be somehow liberated by / from this truth/past. Rather, within the diversity of tactics and strategies of subjectificat1on that are available to us, this book suggests that we "find ourselves' in the past-present-future through the work of invention, as public memories are mobilised, contested and negotiated. The "interiority" of memories and selves are fashioned through the reflexive folding in / back of these discontinuous, exterior surfaces of truths/pasts (cf Rose, 1998).