Can there be history in affect?  Is affect historical?
This paper explores the study of affect in relation to the powerful plots of trauma and memory that have shaped discourse on post-apartheid remembering.  While frequently cast as an ahistorical, atemporal shock to the system, be it of an individual subject or a political collectivity, affect also describes a larger network of feeling whose flows might be productively read in conjunction with those of historical events and their aftermath.  This paper will reconsider the critical discourse on “writing history, writing trauma,” in which the Holocaust has played a central role, and revisit the ways in which the differently traumatic history of apartheid has at once inherited a narrative plot for thinking and feeling the history of violence, and recast it.

If trauma has sometimes seemed to offer a transhistorical model for violence, memory, and the narrative practices of reconciling with the past, trauma has also functioned as a category through which important notions of historical difference and distinction emerge.  This paper seeks to elaborate both the pitfalls and possibilities of thinking trauma, focusing both on what “trauma” smooths out or smooths over and on how and why we can understand trauma’s striations.  The paper revisits the South African culture of national trauma by way of a larger consideration of political affect, focusing on how the narrative forms associated with such a culture shape a political feeling that is precisely striated, layered, multidimensional, unsmooth.  I will focus on the novel, a genre long associated with feeling national and national feeling, and on a handful of writers, including Zakes Mda, Achmat Dangor, and Gillian Slovo.  But I hope to raise questions about the broader possibilities of thinking affect, genre, history, memory, and trauma as conjunctures or hinge points in the contemporary study of foundational violence.

How can we compare, without homogenizing, distinct literary cultures elaborated around memory, mourning, and the working through of some larger history of violence? And in what ways might this larger comparative horizon of postcolonial inquiry and its several categories for comparative analysis reshape the local engagements of reading the postapartheid South African novel now? 

Associate Professor Cooppan teaches literature at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Her essays on postcolonial and world literatures, globalization theory, psychoanalysis, and nationalism have appeared in Symploke, Comparative Literature Studies, and several published and forthcoming edited volumes. She is the author of Worlds Within: National Narratives and Global Connections in Postcolonial Writing (2009).