Wounding apertures: violence, affect and photography during and after apartheid

Abstract

Between March and September 2012 there have been sixteen instances of 'necklacing' in the townships just outside of Cape Town. This article argues for understanding these events in relation to the violence of apartheid. It approaches the question of the meanings of the persistence of necklacing through an analysis of photographs of people who had been subject to vigilante violence in the 1980s. The article focuses on the work of Gille de Vlieg, a photographer who, during apartheid, was a member of the Black Sash and of the Afrapix photography collective. I read de Vlieg's photographs as a series of 'wounding apertures' that open a space for affective engagements with the violence of both the past and of the present. The importance of such engagements, the article argues, lies in what political philosopher Hannah Arendt has theorised as the constitutive relation between feeling, thinking and judging.