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Arch Sci (2014) 14:215229
DOI 10.1007/s10502-014-9221-5
ORIGINAL PAPER
Verne Harris
Published online: 5 June 2014 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014
Abstract There are strong dominant discourses across the intersecting spacings of transitional justice, human rights archives, and reckoning with the past. The power of these discourses can close down non-orthodox perspectives and fresh lines of enquiry. The dual goals of the paper are to identify such lines of enquiry and tease out loose threads in the dominant discourses. The result is a provocation ranging from the experiences of the Nelson Mandela Foundation to the work of deconstruction, from queer theory to legal scholarship, and from personal narrative to documentary lm-making. The paper is at once a troubling of dominant discourses and a play with the antonyms of remembering in these discourses.
Keywords Memory Deconstruction Transitional justice Community
Truth commissions Healing Spectrality
Exergues
Since at least the early 1990s, unavoidably, my work has been framed by and located within the discourses and the processes of transitional justice,
This essay is dedicated to Nenad of Serbia, dissenter, conscientious objector, photographer, lover, troubler, believer, and brother. Its rst iteration was as a keynote address, with the same title, presented in the symposium The Antonym of Forgetting: Global Perspectives on Human Rights Archives, University of California, Los Angeles, October 2013. The presentation was made by Skype. Elements of the address were developed and presented as a keynote to the rst in a series of three international dialogues, the Mandela Dialogues, Nelson Mandela Foundation, Johannesburg, November 2013. And the version submitted for publication was presented at the Archive and Public Culture Research Initiative Workshop, University of Cape Town, April 2014.
V. Harris (&)
Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory, Nelson Mandela Foundation, Houghton 2041, South Africa e-mail: [email protected]
Antonyms of our remembering
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something not uncommon for practitioners in human rights archives all over the world during this period. (In dominant English-language archival discourses, the term human rights archives is used loosely to describe archives that identify themselves as human rights archives, archival programmes within human rights organisations, and archives with human rights-related holdings (International Council on Archives 2014). I use the term with considerable discomfort, always in inverted commas.) Increasingly transitional justice framing and positioning...