Unimagined Communities: Post-Apartheid Nation-Building, Memory and Institutional Change in South Africa (1990-2010)

Studies of nationalism insist that the construction of usable pasts is central to the creation of national solidarities and the identity of a nation. However, this scholarship is limited by the scant attention that is paid to how those pasts are constructed, and the mechanisms through which decision-making occurs. The results of this neglect are often abstracted assumptions asserting a voluntarism and coherence that most often do not exist. Repeatedly, studies focus on the products of memorialization which imposes consistency and statist intentionality, after the fact, on what is a contingent, messy and complicated process. In addition, studies often assume a singularity of power, located in an unfragmented state, with authoritarian capacity to produce meaning. This dissertation remedies these flaws by paying attention to the processes and procedures through which national memorialization unfolds. It focuses specifically on the partial critical juncture that enabled South Africaâ s transition, which has produced multiple continuities with and changes from Apartheid institutions. Imagining the memory-nation here is thus theorized as both path-dependent and contingent. There are numerous factors at play in understanding memory-making including the character of transition, fractions within the governing party, frictions in the state, and the relationship between national, international and local contexts. In tracing the processes of memory-making as they are attached to nation-building, this dissertation pays careful attention to processual analysis that rejects the reification of â the nationâ and its memory. It argues that on-going dynamics of power in bureaucratic states tend to lend formal benefit to the already empowered with the so-called previously disadvantaged reliant on more informal mechanisms of asserting voice; in other words, in the context of the post-Apartheid dispensation, democratization and decolonization are not necessarily simultaneous processes. The dissertation does not present a puzzle for resolution, but instead suggests a method of reading the construction of the memory-nation. This method takes context and contingency not as variables in theory, but as theory itself. Thus, the unexceptional exceptionalism that is the nation-state in this global conjuncture can be analyzed and understood.Ph.D