Session 7: Contexts of Hope

Session 7: Contexts of Hope
Chair: Sandra Pilowsky

Whiteness and the Displacement of Hope: South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission and J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace
Victoria Burrows
English, Communication and Cultural Studies, University of Western Australia, Crawley WA, Australia

Hope can sustain life in the face of personal or political despair. It provides a vision of the possibility of better times ahead, of compassion and community, of future affirmation and connection, of how life could be if things were different. It is an impulse that is both kinetic and future-directed and requires dialogue and communication. However, as I shall argue in this paper, for hope is to move from vision to actual implementation of new possibilities, rigorous attention needs to be paid to the dominant dynamics of racial power, and in particular that of the ideology of whiteness.
Working through shame, both through personal acts of writing and public acts of reconciliation, such as South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, can provide an opportunity for moving towards the formation of a communal political solidarity, a community built on hope. In other words, exposing and acknowledging shame on one hand involves an acceptance of responsibility for past injuries, and on the other hand, a chance to let go of the pain and hurt that has resulted from such injustices. This doubled action in turn can institute a re-writing of history that can lay the groundwork of a personal or social healing that has hopeful implications for the future.
However, at the same time, the rhetoric of shame can work to either disguise or displace where the real shame lies and turn a newly invigorated hope into a form of pessimism and hopelessness. My paper will explore this notion through a reading of J.M. Coetzee’s award-winning novel, Disgrace, which transmutes the political shame of apartheid South Africa into the personal sexual shame of a disgraced white man in the contemporary post-apartheid society. Caught up in his own white shame, Coetzee’s protagonist elicits little hope for the future of the new black South Africa.

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This paper considers some issues raised in the critical analysis of the kind of self-help literature that advocates uncovering or nurturing one’s authentic self. The way that authenticity is conceived of in these books tends to rely on a belief in a real self that is wholly in and of itself, and which can be fully known and described in an absolutely truthful set of facts. This is problematic because that conception of the relation between self and facticity has been discredited within contemporary cultural theory, which insists that there is no single and essential core of self.
From the perspective of that theory, it would be uncontroversial to mount a critique arguing that, rather than enabling the discovery of the real self, self-help encourages a particular discursive construction of the self. That kind of critical activity would undertake the intellectually legitimate project of what Nikolas Rose (1990:ix) describes as unsettling ‘our comfortable illusions’ about the ‘truthfulness and humanity’ of the claims made in this literature. This would suggest that the aim of a critical appraisal would be to advance—along Foucauldian lines—the idea that self-help operates as a strategy which serves not to uncover the real self but acts instead in the interests of external agencies of power.
The utility of such an ‘unsettling’ critical project—or at least, the desirability of what such a critique could produce—becomes uncertain, however, when considering how self-help works not just to generate “truths” about the self, but as a technique of enfolding the self in care for itself—a practice that carries the hope of a better kind of existence. Unseating comfortable illusions might strike a blow for veracity but it would be destructive to these practices of self-care. If ‘our comfortable illusions’ are to be unsettled, then what will provide comfort in their place? What are the implications of a critical practice that unsettles a way for channelling a sense of hope?
This paper will argue for the necessity of a generous critical appraisal of self-help—one that is sympathetic to the sense of hope within the seeking for a better kind of self, even when that search is conceived in terms which critical theory does not find appropriate or logical. By using this example, I argue that critical cultural theory must be careful to ensure that the terms of its enquiry are not hostile to hopefulness, but instead would work with it productively.