Paret,
Marcel. 2018. “Critical Nostalgias in Democratic South Africa.” The
Sociological Quarterly 59(4): 678-696.
Evidence
suggests that some black residents in South Africa experience nostalgia for the
racist and authoritarian apartheid regime. What dynamics
generate apartheid nostalgia, and what work does it do? This article
draws on in-depth interviews with black residents of impoverished urban
townships and informal settlements. I argue that by eliminating formal racial
discrimination and redirecting popular aspirations towards the state, South
Africa’s democratic transition encouraged apartheid nostalgia, which
residents deployed to criticize the post-apartheid state and imagine
alternative possibilities. Far from uniform, nostalgic expressions focused on
four objects: social protection, migrant exclusion, bureaucratic integrity, and
white governance. Each object represented an aspect of the apartheid state
that residents sought to resurrect. The analysis calls for a shift from a
politics of regret, focused on shame for past atrocities, to a politics of
nostalgia, which understands idealized projections of past objects as a terrain
of struggle.
