The Uses of Nostalgia: Drama, History, and Liminal Moments in South Africa

The Uses of Nostalgia: Drama, History, and Liminal Moments in South Africa LOREN KRUGER Timed to coincide with the first universal election and the official end of white minority rule in South Africa, the Market Theatre's revival of Sophiatown might have given pause to those who rushed to define the election as the liminal moment of all liminal moments: South Africa's final entry into a postcolonial era. Developed by the Junction Avenue Theatre Company (JATC) after the unrest of 1984/85 which made the townships "ungovernable" but did not dislodge the government, the play is set in 1950S Sophiatown, which, as the last mixed freehold suburb of Johannesburg, was a primary target for demolition by the architects of segregation. I In encounters between a young Jewish woman and several Sophiatown denizens - writer, gangster. activist, landowner , and others of African and mixed descent - Sophiatown offered its audiences a glimpse of a somewhat integrated but hardly harmonious community . Performed in 1986 and again in 1994, the play revived what might be called the myth of Sophiatown. Part ghetto, part cultural bazaar, a meeting place of black radicals, bohemians of all colors, and ·organized and disorganized criminals, Sophiatown was an actual but thoroughly imaginary place that came to symbolize a fragUe moment of racial tolerance and cultural diversity , crushed by the apartheid juggernaut and later buried under the weight of more militant times. There is a certain irony. as one commentator wrote of the 1994 revival, that, "at the moment of liberation we should be moved by a Jewish girl living with black men in the bad days of early apartheid; that we should find comfort, not in the possibilities of tomorrow but in the struggles of yesterday.'" From this point of view, the revival appears to express a desire to dissolve the violence and dislocation of the 1990S in the legendary images of non-violent civil disobedience and the urban diversity in the 1950S and thus to gloss over the actual brutality of the state's response to peaceful dissent. But this desire also articulates a sense of hesitation on the edge of the future, a pause on the brink Modern Drama, 38 (r99S) 60 The Uses of Nostalgia: South Africa 61 of the postcolonial moment, a shred of doubt - by no means confined to the white or any other minority - that this "post" will bring a clear and definite break with a colonial or neocolonial past. Before we can map the theatre landscape of the interregnum and beyond, we should begin by noting that the term "postcolonial" and the sovereign state it presumably denotes has 'yet to gain the currency in South Africa that it enjoys in metropolitan academic circles or, indeed, in ex-settler colonies such as Canada, Australia, or New Zealand. In those contexts, which seem beyond the elemental struggle for political liberation, economic self-sufficiency, and cultural autonomy, the term "postcolonial" refers less to a notion of time after liberation - than one of space: the part of the globe that used to be called the Third World and that remains profoundly marked by the effects of imperialism and colonization. The influential textbook The Empire Writes Back argues, for example, that "the postcolonial" should "cover all the culture affected by the imperial process from the moment of colonization to the present day."3 The authors thus contain in one space the multiple temporalities of imperialist and anti-imperialist movements, strategies, and discourses. By prematurely celebrating "the pastness of colonialism," Anne McClintock counters, 'The 'post-colonial scene' occurs in an entranced suspension of history " as though all history worthy of the name has already happened - in the metropolis.4 Once we reintroduce agency into this scene, however, the historical - and present-day - repressed returns. As Ella Shohat has observed, we make habitual use of the opposition colonizer/colonized or even necolonizer/ neocolonized, but postcolonizer/postcolonized still sticks in our throats.5 It suggests that postcolonization, far from abolishing colonialism, may be a new and more tenacious version of same. The processes of neo-, post-, and decolonization in present-day South Africa operate in different and often asynchronous time zones. The movement toward liberation tends still to be disjointed...