Oral History, Community and Displacement: Imagining Memories in Post-Apartheid South Africa by Sean Field (review)

This recent addition to Palgrave′s Studies in Oral History series brings together a collection of leading South African oral historian Sean Field′s previously published essays, plus a few new essays written for this volume. Field was a founding member of the Oral History Association of South Africa and directed the Centre for Popular Memory at the University of Cape Town for over a decade. The essays are arranged in roughly chronological order, with the earliest originally published in 1998, and thus this book presents a sort of intellectual autobiography and a history of South African oral history, showing how Field′s thinking and its contexts have evolved over the past two decades. Field counts himself among the many ″disappointed South African[s]″ of the post-apartheid era, and this book is in part an account of his journey from underground African National Congress (ANC) anti-apartheid activist to outspoken critic of the current ANC government (149). A highlight of this volume is Field’s consistent commitment to reflexivity. Many oral historians write about the interview as an intersubjective encounter without being brave enough to expose themselves in the ways in which their narrators do. Field includes his own life history and his emotional responses to the oral history process (including writing) throughout this volume, providing valuable insights and context without overshadowing the narrators.

The chapters are grouped into three parts, each linked to a set of thematic concerns and a period in recent South African history, and each introduced with a short “Framing Notes” essay. The first part consists of four chapters, all previously published in 1998 or 2001, and is heavily influenced by Alessandro Portelli’s work and Raphael Samuel and Paul Thompson’s The Myths We Live By (New York: Routledge, 1990). Field explains in the introduction that this work is a response to a mainstream South African oral history practice that emphasized oral history as a means to fill the gaps in the written historical record or “give voice to the voiceless” and was not particularly concerned with the questions of meaning-making, intersubjectivity, and memory that motivate Field’s work. Field develops the idea of “imagining memories” as a means of emphasizing the creative and the visual aspects of the production of oral history dialogues. Throughout the volume, he returns to the question of “how mental images and emotions are processed through memory-work and storytelling,” often drawing on a psychoanalytic understanding of the self as “fundamentally divided and contradictory, consisting of both conscious and unconscious elements and oscillating between fragmentation and cohesion over time” (9, 12). This theoretical framework allows him to explore questions of identity without reproducing a static model of the self or essentialized visions of community, race, and ethnicity. Building on Portelli’s seminal insight that factually wrong stories yield invaluable insights into the processes of memory and the uses of history, Field deploys Thompson and Samuel’s work on myth and the social role of history to explore how and why South Africans displaced by apartheid narrate their pasts. One of the strengths of this book is that Field applies his framework on a range of scales, from the individual life history to the neighborhood and even the nation. In these chapters, for example, he addresses the ways that racialized myths of manhood shape two different narrators’ life experiences and stories and how mythical representations of a “violent present” and “peaceful past” help one neighborhood’s residents to deal with displacement (53). One particularly valuable contribution from this first phase of Field’s thinking is his work on nostalgia. Often dismissed as simplistic or simply wrong, nostalgic memories are here shown to have complex functions and meaning.

The four essays in the second part of the book are tied together by framing notes on visual memory. Here Field further develops his idea of “imagining memories,” emphasizing the visual aspects...