Apartheid Archives - Public Seminar

Never Again Should Be for Anybody

Germany is on the wrong side of genocide, again

March 6, 2024 • by Zukiswa Wanner

As an aside, and as an African, I wish the German government exhibited the same regret for their history in Namibia with the Herero-Nama genocide and for the genocide during the Maji Maji Rebellion in Tanzania....

Feature

The Globalization of White Supremacy

Countering the Spread of South African Apartheid Rhetoric

April 1, 2019 • by Zeb Larson

In classrooms, apartheid is often depicted as the last gasp of old-school racism, a throwback to an earlier era of European imperialism that took too long to die. Sometimes it’s compared to other racist systems, such as Jim Crow in the United States or the racial hierarchy in Nazi Germany. ...

Feature

The Thick Line

On the impossibility of coming to terms with a dark past

March 16, 2018 • by Santiago Mandirola

"We split away the history of our recent past with a thick line. We will be responsible only for what we have done to help extract Poland from her current predicament from now on." – Tadeusz Masowiecki As Poland’s first post-Communist prime minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki sought to draw a thick line between the ...

Feature

Sing the Rage

Listening to Anger after Mass Violence

July 27, 2017 • by Sonali Chakravarti

The words of Godfrey Xolile Yona, who appeared before the TRC in October 1996, exemplify the type of testimony that is the catalyst for my thinking about the significance of anger in testimony after mass violence and its relationship to restorative justice. Detained for his involvement with the anti-apartheid organization ...

Democracy

Reflections on a Revolutionary Imaginary and Round Tables

The new always appears in the guise of a miracle

April 11, 2014 • by Elzbieta Matynia

This is the prepared text answering the question "What do we really know about transitions to democracy?" for the General Seminar of The New School for Social Research, March 19, 2014.

It was a quarter of a century ago, in 1989, that a new kind of revolutionary imaginary emerged, one that ...

Reflections on a Revolutionary Imaginary and Round Tables

Uncategorized

Sweeping the Sand Out of the Desert: From Verwoerd to Prawer

Ethnic cleansing in the Negev

January 5, 2014 • by Hilla Dayan

The Prawer-Begin Plan was shelved. But the idea that you can forcefully transfer an indigenous population and determine where it can legally reside – looks and smells like a plan pulled from the dusty drawer of Hendrik Verwoerd, architect of Apartheid South Africa. And that didn’t work out so well. ...

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