The Apartheid Archive Project, heterogeneity, and the psychoanalysis of racism

This paper foregrounds the work of the Apartheid Archive Project, an international group of researchers who have begun collecting and analysing narratives of apartheid racism. Apartheid may be approached as an ensemble of elements, as a series of heterogeneous mechanisms – psychical and institutional, structural and subjective – functioning at different levels of influence. A diverse theoretical system and a transformative mode of practice, psychoanalysis proves to be a vital ally in such an analytical approach to the historical trauma of apartheid racism. Not only does psychoanalysis cast light on the psychical mechanisms of racism, it also offers a distinctive perspective on how these mechanisms become intertwined with a series of unexpected correlates. Hence the value of using psychoanalysis to explore racism as it exists in articulation with a variety of other psychical and social phenomena, such as sexualisation, memory and narrative, transitionality and play, national identity and youth culture and melancholia and loss.