Kerry Bystrom

INTRODUCTION: Private lives and public cultures in South Africa

This introductory essay considers how we might forge a critical language to discuss an emerging constellation of cultural production in South Africa: that which focuses on the work of ‘intimate exposure’ in order to shape a public–private sphere, which in turn forges forms of citizenship unavailable, or submerged by, a history of segregation. We ask the two following questions in order to better understand the dynamics of desegregation and re-racialization in twenty-first century South Africa: what is at stake in the dynamics of private exposure, particularly, but not limited to, the work of contemporary artists, be it exposure of the self or exposure of the lives of others – out of aggression or tenderness, as a gesture of ordinariness or excess, in relation to strangeness or love? Moreover, how do new dramas of secrecy, confession and exposure map onto or circumvent the staging of these issues during the apartheid years, which, itself layering over the scars of the colonial period, provide the subterranean foundation across which recent events play out? Addressing these and other questions takes us through a series of debates animating the current global and South African cultural studies.This introductory essay considers how we might forge a critical language to discuss an emerging constellation of cultural production in South Africa: that which focuses on the work of ‘intimate exposure’ in order to shape a public private sphere, which in turn forges forms of citizenship unavailable, or submerged by, a history of segregation. We ask the two following questions in order to better understand the dynamics of desegregation and re-racialization in twenty-first century South Africa: what is at stake in the dynamics of private exposure, particularly, but not limited to, the work of contemporary artists, be it exposure of the self or exposure of the lives of others out of aggression or tenderness, as a gesture of ordinariness or excess, in relation to strangeness or love? Moreover, how do new dramas of secrecy, confession and exposure map onto or circumvent the staging of these issues during the apartheid years, which, itself layering over the scars of the colonial period, provide the subterranean foundation across which recent events play out? Addressing these and other questions takes us through a series of debates animating the current global and South African cultural studies.

The public private sphere: family narrative and democracy in Argentina and South Africa

This article explores the paradoxical prominence of seemingly private family stories and memories in the democratic public spheres emerging in the wake of the ‘Dirty War’ in Argentina and apartheid in South Africa. In part because the discourse of the family was used in these cases to both uphold and protest dictatorial regimes, individuals who lost family members to state violence became powerful moral agents in the post‐dictatorship and post‐apartheid periods. Narratives told by and about these individuals – ranging from personal testimony given in each country’s truth commission to representations in theatre, fiction and film – have worked to constitute what may be called a ‘public private sphere’. They not only express personal grief, but also (and especially in wider cultural circulation) have been emplotted and mobilised to construct democratic publics. These may or may not correspond to the nationwide publics envisioned in state discourses of reconciliation. Using genealogical fiction surrounding ‘disappeared children’ in Argentina as a lens to analyse South Africa, this article argues that stories of children attempting to piece together their family histories reveal this dynamic as they become sites for convening democratic publics and critiquing transitional politics.

Humanitarianism and Responsibility

This article serves as an introduction to the articles in this special issue of the Journal of Human Rights on humanitarianism and responsibility. We thread the work of our contributors, along with other key scholars, together into a broader discussion about the possibilities and limitations of humanitarian responsibility. We first elaborate several constitutive dimensions of responsibility as it has been understood in humanitarian discourse, with particular attention to the way in which it has been deployed to both limit and extend the humanitarian mandate. We then consider how the discourse of humanitarian responsibility constitutes a departure from, and a possible alternative to, the discourse of human rights as the reigning lingua franca in which ethical arguments are advanced at the global level. Ultimately, we contend that while renewed emphasis on responsibility is no panacea for the difficult political and ethical questions that bedevil international humanitarianism and should not displace the focus on human rights, the process of critically engaging with this term may present a valuable opportunity to rethink the pursuit of global justice as a situated and contingent engagement between the self and those distant and proximate others who are exposed to catastrophes, natural and man-made.

The DNA of the Democratic South Africa: Ancestral Maps, Family Trees, Genealogical Fictions

This article focuses on the discourse of popular science – and particularly that of genetics and evolution – as it has been used in the democratic South Africa to develop and articulate a shared ‘African’ national identity. Analysing speeches by politicians and academics, as well as sites of popular culture ranging from television shows to the Maropeng centre at the Cradle of Humankind, I explore how a new ‘evolutionary family narrative’, in which all humans are understood to have an African ‘mother’, has been harnessed in an attempt to guarantee ‘belonging’ to citizens of all races. I further show how this specific genetic family narrative is one of a larger network of ‘genealogical fictions’ that have been fabricated and produced in part for the purpose of redefining the national community in the post-apartheid era, and which tend to reiterate the basic tropes of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century nation-building projects in the new millennium. Finally, I analyse two novels – Zoë Wicombs Davids Story and Nadine Gordimers Get a Life – that debate the continuing usefulness of such genealogical fictions in the work of building a contemporary democratic nationalism.

Reading the South Atlantic: Chile, South Africa, the Cold War, and Mark Behr's The Smell of Apples

This article focuses on the often-ignored figure of the Chilean general at the heart of Mark Behrs (in)famous post-apartheid novel The Smell of Apples (1995). It asks the question: What can a Latin American general mean to the protagonist of the novel and to South Africa more generally? Analysing the forms of mimicry and doubling at play in the text, it argues that the Chilean general serves as an uncanny double whose representation helps to reveal the psychological mechanisms of acknowledgement and repression that underpinned Afrikaner support for apartheids military regime. It further argues that Behrs concomitant use of Pinochets Chile as an uncanny double for apartheid South Africa points to Cold War anti-communist military and political networks – routed through the United States but also existing bi-laterally between Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, and South Africa – that allowed for the circulation of both technologies and cultures of state-sponsored terror, and which later opened into shared modes of democratic transformation. The article ultimately poses Behrs text as a call for further readings of the South Atlantic as a zone of transit and transfer between Southern Africa and South America.

On "Humanitarian" Adoption (Madonna in Malawi)

In a luxury hotel in Acapulco, a group of women from the United States eat, swim, take in the tourist attractions, and wait for the processing of their international adoptions so that they can return home with their new babies. These women are the protagonists of John Sayles’s film Casa de los Babys (2003). As it follows one day in their lives, Sayles’s film gives voice to the stories of these women, who—despite their varied backgrounds and personalities—all believe that adoption will fulfill their frustrated aspirations for motherhood and thus allow them to ‘‘complete’’ themselves. It creates sympathy for these characters by exposing gender norms that conflate female identity with motherhood, and it makes visible what Ann Anagnost calls a regime of ‘‘maternal citizenship’’ linking parenthood, consumption, social value, and political agency.1 But the film also conveys the colonialist belief of many of the women that the babies will be ‘‘better off ’’ in the United States simply because they will possess more economic stability. In other words, Sayles reveals the problematic vision of the adoptive mothers that satisfying their desire for motherhood will unquestionably improve the lives of the children they adopt. Such a belief resonates with what David L. Eng identifies as the original ‘‘humanitarian’’ justifications given to the public for transnational adoption, when it began to be practiced in the United States on a large scale after World War II.2 As Laura Briggs documents, at this time photographic images of starving and abandoned children from overseas war zones began to saturate the news media. After the war, such images were used to build support for organizations like UNICEF and to underpin the burgeoning practice of transnational adoption.3 The Korean War in particular proved to be a watershed, since it inspired crusaders like the evangelical Harry Holt to publicize the adoption of Korean orphans as a mode of relief work. While Korea was the first and for some time the largest site for transnational adoptions, adoptions from other conflict zones in Asia such as Vietnam and Cambodia followed.4 More recently, transnational adoption has focused on China, where the adoption of baby girls has been scripted as a way to ‘‘rescue’’ these children from a supposedly sexist culture.5 New members of the ‘‘diaper diaspora’’ are also increasingly drawn from what are seen as the povertyand violence-stricken former Eastern Bloc countries, Latin America, and Africa.6 What Anagnost calls the ‘‘theme of salvage’’ so central to the worldview of Sayles’s adoptive mothers, however, is not the whole story revealed in the film.7 Sayles carefully splices together the perspectives of the American women with those of local people whose lives interconnect with the Yanquis. One discourse that the Mexicans introduce to the debate is that of commodity extraction. A would-be revolutionary whose

South Africa, the USA, and the Globalization of Truth and Reconciliation: Itinerant Mourning in Zakes Mda's Cion

This essay juxtaposes two different visions of ‘‘itinerant mourning,’’ a term I borrow from the South African playwright and fiction writer, Zakes Mda. The first version of this practice that I would like to address can be found in the model of transitional justice that went into global circulation almost as soon as the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC, 1996–8) began work in 1996, but particularly in the years following the publication of its 1998 Report. The second version of ‘‘itinerant mourning’’ is represented in Mda’s latest novel, Cion (2007). As I will detail below, Cion transports the protagonist of Ways of Dying (1995)—Mda’s novel about the South African transition to democracy—from South Africa to the United States, specifically to the area surrounding Ohio University, Athens, where Mda currently works as Professor of Creative Writing. This protagonist is the inimitable Toloki, whose occupation as ‘‘professional mourner’’ is, of course, key to this essay’s project of mapping out new areas of transnational connection between the US and South Africa, and exploring the openings for social transformation that appear as forms of politics and works of art move across localities within the broader context of twenty-first century globalization.

Humanitarianism, Responsibility, Links, Knots

The doctrine of the ‘responsibility to protect’ (R2P), adopted as a guiding principle by the United Nations at the World Summit in 2005, was initially conceived as a way to resolve the state sovereignty–universal rights bind and to rectify the failures of humanitarian intervention in cases such as Somalia, Rwanda and Kosovo. While R2P has not exactly succeeded in these aims, the debates surrounding it point to an urgent need to reimagine both the ethics of humanitarian intervention and the meaning of the term ‘responsibility’. This essay poses Nuruddin Farahs Links (2003) and Knots (2007) – the first two novels of his Past Imperfect trilogy – as texts that take up this challenge. Along with offering an important critique of the US-led UN intervention in Somalia in 1992, these novels represent modes of humanitarian action where responsibility is conceived outside of hierarchical moral terms. Ultimately, they reveal the links that oblige humans to help each other as reciprocal knots, and suggest that productive humanitarianism begins not from an external desire to untangle or ‘solve’ political crises but from an intimate sense of ethical, emotional and material ‘entanglement’.

Humanitarianism and Responsibility in Discourse and Practice

On 17 March 2011, the United Nations Security Council (2011a) adopted a historic resolution authorizing the use of ‘all necessary measures […] to protect civilians’ in Libya. Speaking on behalf of a government that had been among the most vocal advocates of military intervention, the French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe (United Nations Security Council 2011b) implored his fellow Council members: ‘Every hour and day that goes by increasing the burden of responsibility on our shoulders. If we are careful not to act too late, the Security Council will have the distinction of having ensured in Libya law prevails over force, democracy over dictatorship and freedom over oppression.’ Speaking a year later about another of the Arab Spring’s bloodier conflicts, Jordanian Interior Minister Ghaleb Zu’bi (Neimat 2013) pledged not bombs but safe haven for the thousands pouring over the border from Syria. ‘Jordan has a humanitarian [responsibility] to Syrian refugees and cannot turn its back on them.’ That same year, the British-based nongovernmental organization Oxfam decried the failure to help victims of the latest Somali famine: ‘There has been a catastrophic breakdown in the world’s collective responsibility to act (Oxfam International 2011).’ In 2010, after the Haitian earthquake, George Clooney, actor and organizer of the ‘Hope for Haiti Now’ telethon, told millions of viewers, ‘We all have a lot of responsibility to look out for people that can’t look out for themselves’ (Viacom 2010).

Writing Roots in Post-Apartheid South Africa

What are the benefits and drawbacks of the popular practice of writing Alex Haley-style Roots narratives—and making roots claims more broadly—in post-apartheid South Africa? This article explores this question through special attention to two South African neo-slave narratives. The first, Botlhale Tema’s The People of Welgeval (2005), is a contemporary version of Haley’s classic that reveals the benefits of genealogical narration particularly in repairing individual trauma and addressing the vexing problem of land redistribution. The second, Yvette Christiansë’s Unconfessed (2006), can be read as text that challenges both the literary model and the psychological and social projects I associate with Haley and Tema, as it foregrounds the gaps or cracks present in such acts of recuperation and focuses on a kind of pain than cannot be assuaged or made up for. I argue that, taken together, these novels concerned both with historical slavery in South Africa and its legacy in the democratic present help us to move beyond a longstanding “roots”/ “routes” dichotomy to understand what roles each term plays for individuals grappling with racial oppression and where, how, and why the terms fold into each other.