The End of History, Again: Pursuing the Past in the PostcolonyJean Comaroff Abstract: The paper explores the paradoxical relationship, in postcolonial Africa, between history-as-learned and history-as-lived. Current conditions have proliferated the forms of recollection, encouraging a fetishism of “heritage” and a privatization of the past. The likes of Benjamin have urged us to recognize that history might disperse itself in habitations both diverse and banal. But can there be such a thing as “too much history?” Evidence from South Africa over the past decade suggests that, while the popular arts of recollection abound, History as scholarly pursuit is severely threatened. Much of the country’s children still learn about the past from apartheid-era textbooks. What might the deregulation of memory have to do with the seemingly impossibility of arriving at a history of the postcolony itself? |