Extract

Abstract: The findings presented in this chapter demonstrate that space is featuring prominently in way the apartheid past is remembered. In order to grasp this spatial dimension, Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope is applied as it provides a nuanced analysis of how subjects construe the past in spatial-temporal terms. By analysing how the past is framed as space-time in the accounts of the interview partners, I show that two different scenarios can be discerned: the concrete and the abstract chronotope. In accounts employing the concrete chronotope, space fundamentally determines people’s lives. Their racial classification regulates their radius of action, their possible movements and their social relations in racially restricted spaces. On the other hand, in narratives framing the past according to the abstract chronotope, apartheid “happened” in a space outside of the families’ lives. The family inhabits an enclave, a quasi-distant land that did not come in contact with apartheid. One of the most relevant features of Bakhtin’s chronotope is that it aids to identify constellations of time and space as models of agency. This agency is expressed by means of the subject and in discourse and this is achieved by the movement of bodies in space or by relating different spaces by means of the senses, such as sight and audition, or by any means of communication. The analysis reveals that representatives of the born-free generation interpret their families’ agency in the apartheid regime quite differently because these arrangements of space and time in discourse fundamentally determine subjects’...