The disappointment of nostalgia: conceptualising cultures of memory in contemporary South Africa

Departing from a consideration of Jacob Dlamini’s book, Native Nostalgia, this essay critically reviews the conceptual terrain implied by “nostalgia,” re-situating it in relation to memory, especially where it intersects with debates over the status of “truth” in relation to “history.” We explore nostalgia through three dualities that underpin a burgeoning literature: remembering and forgetting, witnessing and testimony, and mourning and melancholia. Against conceptual oppositions that pit remembering against forgetting, or alternatively, that seek to remedy the fallibility of memory by seeking access to the “truth” of history, we suggest that nostalgia is probably more usefully understood as a practice of coincident temporalities. Nostalgia, in this sense, denotes a specific way of enfolding the past into the present, and indeed the future. We discuss two projects of post-apartheid testimony that work from, and on, the presumed antagonism that nostalgia sets up between “truth” and its possible distortions in memory: the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of 1996–1998, and the Apartheid Archive Project initiated in 2009. We conclude by suggesting that South Africans may need to pursue what Ackbar Abbas has called an “affective politics of disappointment” if the past is to be brought more creatively to bear on South Africa’s future.