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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Nostalgia After Apartheid: Disillusionment, Youth, and Democracy in South Africa

Nostalgia After Apartheid: Disillusionment, Youth, and Democracy in South Africa

Reed, Amber R.

Hardcover

Series: Kellogg Institute Democracy and Development

African HistoryAnthropologyGeneral Political Science

ISBN10: 0268108773
ISBN13: 9780268108779
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
Published: Nov 30 2020
Pages: 248
Weight: 1.11
Height: 0.63 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English

In this engaging book, Amber Reed provides a new perspective on South Africa's democracy by exploring Black residents' nostalgia for life during apartheid in the rural Eastern Cape. Reed looks at a surprising phenomenon encountered in the post-apartheid nation: despite the Department of Education mandating curricula meant to teach values of civic responsibility and liberal democracy, those who are actually responsible for teaching this material (and the students taking it) often resist what they see as the imposition of white values. These teachers and students do not see South African democracy as a type of freedom, but rather as destructive of their own African culture--whereas apartheid, at least ostensibly, allowed for cultural expression in the former rural homelands. In the Eastern Cape, Reed observes, resistance to democracy occurs alongside nostalgia for apartheid among the very citizens who were most disenfranchised by the late racist, authoritarian regime. Examining a rural town in the former Transkei homeland and the urban offices of the Sonke Gender Justice Network in Cape Town, Reed argues that nostalgic memories of a time when African culture was not under attack, combined with the socioeconomic failures of the post-apartheid state, set the stage for the current political ambivalence in South Africa. Beyond simply being a case study, however, Nostalgia after Apartheid shows how, in a global context in which nationalism and authoritarianism continue to rise, the threat posed to democracy in South Africa has far wider implications for thinking about enactments of democracy.

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