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concerns. For example, however, Nancy’s concept of
“being-in-common” resonates strongly with the concept of Ubuntu and the kinds of demands and challenges that the concept of Ubuntu presents us with
when we turn to constitutional fetishism.
What Nancy and Mogobe Ramose’s concept of
Ubuntu (he is just one theorist on the topic) do is
challenge the centrality of the social contract as
the delimitation of the political. The social contract
as we think of it in contemporary western liberal
democracies might help us attend to the utilitarian
demands of institutional politics, but if we want to
take seriously the questions of inclusion, reconciliation, memory, and justice, then we have to ask much
bigger questions.
M: After reading your articles, I was thinking about
the Winston Churchill quote “History is written by
the victors” and I was thinking about where history is written. Well, history’s enshrined in our
Constitution, in the stories told in, for example, the
British Museum. So your work goes to interrupting
that and destabilizing their functions, so that history
gets written by those who have their stories silenced—
those that need telling—rather than just the one central normative story that is being told in our society.
S: In a way it is that, and in a way it is more than that,
because one of the dangers is the kind of substitution
of a romantic conception of history, where history
from below becomes the next truth, continuing to
rely on these kinds of conceptions. It’s about a constant interrogation of that notion of history and the
limits of representation writ large. For example, some
of the theorists that talk about counter-monumental
memorializing practices talk about this monument
called the “Monument Against Fascism” constructed
in 1986 in Hamburg. The idea was that they had this
massive obelisk and they got all these people from
Hamburg to write their names on it, and then, over
the next 10 years, they gradually sunk the monument into the ground so that it was gone. For these
South African constitutional theorists thinking about
counter-monumentalism, they kind of herald this as
an example of what they mean. In a way, it is a project
that represents that the unrepresentable also exists.
We want to have a monument that destroys the very
concept of monumentalizing.
The artists claim that the erasure of the monument
puts this responsibility on “us” to stand up against
justice; in other words, monuments aren’t going to
do it for us—we have to do it. Now what I say in my
work is that while the monument was an interesting
gesture, I question the monumentalizing proclivities of such a statement. The idea imputed here is that
we are not “fascists”—but how can we be so sure? We
know our concepts of freedom and justice often get
tangled in imperialist and colonial projects. The very
concept of justice needs to be interrogated. So counter-monumentalizing for me goes even further than
the erasure of the monument; it is about writing that
interruption and that need to interrupt these narratives. Just getting rid of the monument doesn’t quite
do it. You need that constant interrogation of what is
being monumentalized – whether in material reality
or discursively—and that is why I see that possibility
in the museum, the District 6 Museum in particular.
M: So I guess it is important to tackle the big
Monday, December 1, 2014 15
questions, attack the centralized hegemonic institutions that dictate the boundaries of community?
S: In a way, but again, it can also be an interrogation of grassroots organizations that want to romanticize community and say, “We’re the oppressed.
We need to have our own story/we need to tell the
story.” And there’re larger political questions about
that. For example, Amy Lonetree wrote this book
called Decolonizing Museums, and she would basically argue against me; she would say that what I
am suggesting is a descent into Postmodernism,
and when we romanticize this kind of fragmentation and resistance to narrative, especially the narratives of the oppressed, we forget to tell the story
of the oppressed. So what she says in the American
context is that museums, rather than descending into
Postmodernism, need to just tell the story of colonization and how the Indigenous people in the United
States have been screwed over because that story isn’t
out there. I take that on board.
There is something very important to what she’s
saying. On the other hand, I wonder about it as a limited strategy, in terms of bringing in or continuing
those inheritances about how we think about community and the individual within it. I’m not sure we
can get away from it if we keep perpetuating the same
memorializing techniques we’ve been using.
ê The preliminary draft of Canada’s constitution by the
Colonial Office. Photo credit: National Archives of Canada
M: I like your idea of destabilizing the constant
attempt to memorialize, because for me, even
Postmodernism, in its attempt to allow more voices
to be heard by removing the tyrannical hegemony, or
totalizing center, however you want to put it, creates
a void in the middle, a black hole that the fragmentary narratives orbit around. But instead of allowing
more voices to be heard, everything gets sucked into
it because nothing is allowed to occupy that centre,
and nothing is actually being heard. In your view, as
the title of your talk “Community Interrupted: To