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Walder, Dennis
(2013).
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/10253866.2013.776306
Abstract
Much of the remembering of recent years in South Africa has involved nostalgia, but a nostalgia of excess and morbidity, or what might be called hysteria. The endangered body stands as a memorial to the distortions of apartheid, and there are many manifestations in the culture of the country. Here I analyse two performative works by expatriate South Africans who in contrasting but related ways express through them a hysterical-nostalgic relation to their country’s past: Coming Home, a memory-play by Athol Fugard, and Neill Blomkamp’s dystopian film District 9, both of which touch on the country’s HIV/AIDS crisis. Resisting inadmissible yearnings for the apartheid past leads to revealing versions of nostalgia, in terms of broader cultural aesthetics, and the politics of the present – a time of continuing turbulence and uncertainty.
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About
- Item ORO ID
- 36989
- Item Type
- Journal Item
- ISSN
- 1477-223X
- Extra Information
- Special Issue: Nostalgia in the Twenty-First Century
- Keywords
- hysteria; nostalgia; memory; performative; Freud; Athol Fugard; Coming Home; Neill Blomkamp; District 9; Johannesburg; rural versus urban; post-apartheid
- Academic Unit or School
-
Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS) > Arts and Humanities > English & Creative Writing
Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS) > Arts and Humanities
Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS) - Research Group
- Postcolonial and Global Literatures Research Group (PGL)
- Copyright Holders
- © 2013 Taylor & Francis
- Depositing User
- Dennis Walder