Paper short abstract:

By examining affective responses to a planned artistic appropriation of a historically significant site in post-apartheid South Africa, this paper explores the process of relating the 'nation' to stories of the past and resulting contestations to this process.

Paper long abstract:

Stories of the nation unite and divide: those who are perceived or who perceive themselves authorised to speak from those who are not, those who belong 'within' from those who fall without. Within the context of the completed Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa and the move to rethink the history of the Anglo-Boer war more inclusively beyond purely 'white' South African involvement, stories, narrations and memorialisations of the past had come to play a significant role in the government's projections of a new and reconciled South African nation. Within these projections, a recurring theme had been the need to create a common stock of stories about the past within which the country's people would find their voice and so identify with the newly united 'nation'.

This paper explores the limits of this process, focusing on responses catalysed by a planned artistic appropriation of a Fort of symbolic importance to the Afrikaner resistance. Affective responses to the appropriation limited its aesthetic relevance and drowned out the possibility of its further interrogation. The event transformed the site of conflict into a site of contestation over who could claim ownership of its past sacrifice and who was so authorised to tell the stories of the Afrikaner present. This case reminds us of the fallacy of believing in the existence of a detached history into which detached subjects are willing and able to insert themselves. Significantly, it considers the implications of dis-owned histories on its possessors and their relationship to 'nation'.