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“Troubling” stories: thoughts on the making of meaning of shame/ful memory narratives in (post)apartheid South Africa

ABSTRACT Reflecting on narratives collected as part of the Apartheid Archive Project, a memory project of “ordinary” experiences of living under apartheid, this paper engages with stories that articulate white South Africans’ shame/ful relationships with Black female domestic workers. It is increasingly of concern that the dominant response to apartheid abuses are to consider them “in the past” in order to avoid discomforting reminders. Shame and its silencing effect, as feminist and other critical literature shows, is bound up with relations of power, legitimating privilege and subjugation. Yet, shame may also be deployed as narrative strategy to deal with subjective discomfort and guilt by those seeking to disentangle themselves from association with social privilege and its abuses. How do we respond to narratives that may have both effects? Drawing on contemporary critical pedagogies, such as the work of Zembylas that specifically engage with the affective turn, and guided by Probyn’s argument that shame is a powerful resource of social critique, this paper suggests productive possibilities of such narratives in contemporary South Africa. While acknowledging contestations, an argument is made for the value of stories of shame/shaming towards troubling the erasure of apartheid and its continuities in the present while also disrupting the denial of historical and current complicity with power and privilege.