South African Past Voices and Herstories: Performances as Counter-Texts

Abstract

This paper investigates creative intersections of race and gender in South African multimedia spaces in the construction of the country’s historical narrative(s). Whose past is recorded and how is it preserved/represented in the national cultural archive? The article focuses on historical female figures forgotten, manipulated or marginalized in the official records, as a privileged site of South African female historical counter-narratives. This approach relies on recent studies that invite scholars to adopt “alternative methodologies that take seriously the realm of the speculative and the imaginative” (Soudien 2023: 83).

Keywords

• krotoa
• sarah baartman
• postcolonial archive
• south african poetry
• post-apartheid