The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

about the past, as “political elites engaged in a symbolic dialogue with each other and
with the public in an attempt to gain prestige, legitimacy and influence”. 91
While the memorial complex in the United States has its origins in the commemorative
landscape of the Civil War and emancipation, which represents a “story of systematic
cultural repression, carried out in the guise of reconciliation and harmony”, a new
genre of contemplative memorials, such as the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, emerged
as a means through which ‘difficult pasts’ of defeat, controversy and dishonour could
be reflected upon. 92 In the 1990s, this memorial layering was added to by a
“remarkable profusion” of monuments and museums which sought to “define the
contemporary significance of America’s civil rights revolution”, and which, for some
scholars, “desegregated America’s memorial landscape”. 93 This “complex, sometimes
ironic landscape” of monuments, historic markers, parks, registered buildings and
museums across the South presented clear challenges to a public history, which
depicted “an elite, white American past”. However, its historical representations
tended to replicate conventions associated with civil rights historiography. While the
past was rendered in “an explicitly antiracist” fashion, for the most part, there was a
tendency for portrayals to be located in a ‘Great Man’ paradigm, which gave attention
to leaders at the national level, and not local organisers and participants. The
mainstream narratives at the largest civil rights memorials continue to place emphasis
91 Benjamin Forest and Juliet Johnson, ‘Unravelling the Threads of History: Soviet Era Monuments
and Post‐Soviet National Identity in Moscow’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers,
92(3), 2002, p 524.
92 Kirk Savage, ‘The Politics of Memory: Black Emancipation and the Civil War Monument’, in
John R Gillis (ed), Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity, p 143; Kirk Savage, Standing
Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth‐Century America (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1997); Robin Wagner‐Pacifici and Barry Schwartz, ‘The Vietnam
Veterans Memorial: Commemorating a Difficult Past’, American Journal of Sociology, Vol 97, No 2
(September 1991). It is interesting to note that contrary to the intentions behind the Vietnam
Veterans Memorial, this site is an object with which visitors “enter into active and affective
relationships” (pp 402‐403), through the touching and reproductive tracing of names, and the
deposit of special objects, gifts or statements.
93 Owen J Dwyer, ‘Interpreting the Civil Rights Movement: Place, Memory, and Conflict’,
Professional Geographer, 52(4), 2000, pp 660‐661.
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