Speaking Unspoken Memories: Remembering Apartheid Racism in Australia

The Apartheid Archive Project (AAP) is an exemplar of an interdisciplinary project that seeks to contribute through critical scholarship to broader processes of social transformation including the recovery of historical memory via the collection of narratives of experiences of racism during apartheid. In this article I draw on formal stories submitted to the Apartheid Archive Project by South African immigrants in Australia about their memories of racism and insights gained while hanging out with potential participants. The themes within the stories highlight the public spaces in which different groups interacted and the strategies of surveillance White people used to control Black people. Narrators wrote about the effects of as well as the ways in which they responded to racism. The stories also suggest that participants continue rearticulating their experiences in the new sociocultural context. It is within the new context that participants felt free to pursue personal, economic, and professional aspirations. It is also in this context that participants developed deeper understandings of the effects of racism on their subjectivities, and in everyday settings they began to overcome racism and cultural mistrust rooted in apartheid oppression. The implications of the Apartheid Archive Project for promoting healing and reconciliation by providing a "space" for remembering and for telling stories about the past and constructing new stories and subjectivities are considered.