Nostalgia in reimagining the past: the subjectivity of memory in the representation of history. A textual analysis of Rehad Desai's documentary films

South Africa occupies a unique space in terms of the decolonization of the continent of Africa. While massive projects of decolonization where happening across the continent, South Africa was subjected to a conservative and racialised project of segregation. This arrested development makes for an interesting anachronism in South Africa as disconcerting “Third- World” and “First-World” economies emerged creating an anomalous temporality. I was born just a month before the inimitable Ruth First was unceremoniously assassinated in Mozambique in 1982. While further South, one of the most underreported conflicts of apartheid South Africa was in its nascent stages no further than a kilometer away from my house. I am referring of course to the violent clashes between factions of both the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) and the African National Congress (ANC), played in the men’s hostel of the third largest township in the country, Umlazi, South of Durban. These would only come to have meaning to me later, when I was at university. I mention these cultural and perhaps socio-political artefacts in so far as they relate to the kind of environment that lead to this research enquiry. Which is to say that as social beings, we are in fact products of the things that affect the social environment that we exist in. This is not a new idea. What is particularly interesting for this enquiry is the eclecticism of the emblems that survive to shapes one’s own identity and perception of the world around them. Within the above stated mini-biography lies a complex matrix of emotions and extrapolated meanings mediated through a conflicted and negotiated understanding of what the social history of South Africa meant for my own personal history. This paper is an attempt to think through articulations of time as they are constituted by future-orientated subjectivities extending back to varied pasts. It does so by exploring a recent work of black South African self-writing, Jacob Dlamini’s Native Nostalgia (2009). Considering the text’s treatment of time, I argue that porous conceptions of temporality open up possibilities for self-enunciation. What Paul Gilroy has described as “the signs of sameness” (2000, 101). Meaning that these could be quantified and as such researchable and in fact applied across various cultural texts (including but not limited to film). The body of work from South African documentary filmmaker Rehad Desai provides an interesting case study to examine Jacob Dlamini’s thematic pre-occupations with nostalgia. Nostalgia here is used to see if such pre-occupations can be applied to a filmic body of work. Desai’s body of work is interesting to this enquiry because it almost exclusively deals with the temporalities of South Africa as “refracted through the prism of the past”. By this I mean Desai through his work appears to reflect on South Africa’s storied past as it affects current happenings. It is the intention of this paper to argue that Desai deals with his subject (the evolution of the South African political landscape) in similar terms to the way Jacob Dlamini explores the notion of reflective nostalgia