A Bundle of Silences: South African Public Art and the Erasure of Women
This paper considers the extent to which women’s participation in South Africa’s struggle for democracy is represented and remembered, and more often forgotten, in South African public art, including commemorative sites. In her book Visual Culture and Public Memory in a Democratic South Africa, Annie Coombes says, “Women’s vital role in the overthrow of the apartheid state has been sorely neglected in favor of a more monolithic representation of the liberation movement.” This imbalance is significant given that women were not silenced or marginalized within the anti-apartheid movement: they were, in fact, active participants in all aspects of the liberation struggle.
With a focus on civic monuments and public art in South Africa, this paper considers issues raised by historians throughout the continent (of Africa) and elsewhere concerning the public erasure of women’s contributions to nationalist liberation struggles.
Focusing on questions of gender, this talk will examine the few examples of commemorations of historic women in the public arts in order to explore tensions surrounding public memory practices, how they regulate gender, and the messages they convey about the perceived importance of women’s political roles during – and directly after – political transition.
How is women’s agency recognized, or made visible, in the public sphere? What is at stake in how women are remembered?