Session 9: Identity, Racism and Intervention

Session 9: Identity, Racism and Intervention
Chair: Susan Chassay

Re-Constructing South African Identity after 1994: Museums and Public History
Kate Flynn & Tony King

Since the end of apartheid, public history in South Africa has been undergoing reconstruction. One important goal is creation of a cross-racial and -cultural civic identity as opposed to the pre-democratic premise of opposing, legally unequal ethnic communities.
However, as borne out by research at public history museums in Gauteng, Northern Cape, Western Cape, Eastern Cape and KwaZulu Natal, there is little agreement as to what qualifies as an inclusive South African, rather than racially or culturally exclusive, history, and little co-ordination at the national or provincial level to encourage an over-arching philosophy of how to present South African history to the public. This is not surprising given the fractured character of South Africa’s recent past and negotiated nature of its pacted transition.
But, as a result, many post-1994 changes at public history museums are ad hoc, inconsistent and discretionary, lending themselves to a sense of irrelevance or even hostile partiality to varied sectors of the South African public. While inclusive ‘reconciliation’ is the ideal principle of the new South Africa, museums have not been able to capitalize on this sentiment if one takes into account that, at almost all sites investigated, the vast majority of visitors are either not voluntary (children on school outings) or South African (foreign tourists). Given that most sites are not primarily accessed out of choice by the South African public, the potential of public history museums, along with the narratives they present, to enhance civic cohesion and cross-racial or –cultural understanding is severely limited.

In this paper I will investigate processes of intercultural encounters as to their interrelationship between knowledge, socio-political power strategies and representations of the “Other”. I will argue that constructions of a stereotyped”Other” are produced in political acts which shape socio-political realities and, as a consequence, I will analyse racism as a socio-political phenomenon.
I will point out that stereotypes form imaginative concepts of the “Other”, thereby producing conditions that cause conflicts whose existence are explained by these very non-differentiated concepts. I will argue that there are common strategies how to deal with “Otherness”: on the one hand, “Otherness” justifies political actions to ´unify´ a nation-state; on the other hand, ´primitive´ and/or ´economically efficient´ “Otherness” are deliberately created for prospective markets. In this context I will draw attention to language used as a discriminatory tool when constructing the stereotyped”Other” .
In the end, I will argue that racism must be made unacceptable as a standard on all levels of human encounters and I will point to inter culturally appropriate encounters as contact zones where the participants re-assess their concepts of the “Other/s” in intersubjective learning processes. I will conclude that education and knowledge, generated in interculturally sensitive encounters, will support processes in which participants articulate their racial/cultural identity as an innate feature of transparent diversity, which constitutes the basis for mutual respect and understanding.