This presentation deals with the intergenerational transmission of memory of apartheid South Africa by drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin's essay 'The Chronotope'. My aim is to provide a framework to think about agency in narrative which can be fruitfully linked to the exploration of (linguistic) biographies through the lens of embodiment.
Biographical approaches, it has been well demonstrated, reveal the perspective of speakers in relation to specific power constellations. Brigitta Busch's contribution to linguistic theory provides an understanding of speaking subjects' embodied and affective relation to the linguistic repertoire (e.g. Busch 2017) in the course of their lives vis-á-vis political and ideological frictions caused by mobility and/or regime changes. This presentation addresses the question of embodied remembrance in times of political transition from one regime to another. The findings are based on a study which explored the intergenerational transmission of the memory of apartheid South Africa among representatives of the born-free generation who did not experience apartheid themselves. The data is based on biographical interviews conducted in different socio-economic areas of Cape Town which used to be racially divided into black, white and coloured Group Areas respectively. By drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin's essay of the chronotope (1981), two ways of narrating the past are identified which I term the concrete and the abstractchronotope: in the first, the historical experience of apartheid resonates in embodied memory of the young people whereas in the latter, apartheid is spatio-temporally separated from the lived experience of the family. This concept offers a perspective to capture the complexity of the memory of the born-free generation which cannot be reduced to simple ascriptions of race as an alleged community of memory. My aim is to provide a framework to think about agency in narrative which can be fruitfully linked to the exploration of (linguistic) biographies through the lens of embodiment. Bakhtin, Mikhail 1981: The Dialogic Imagination. Four Essays. Edited by Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press. Busch, Brigitta 2017: Expanding the Notion of the Linguistic Repertoire. On the Concept of Spracherleben– The lived Experience of Language. In: Applied Linguistics 38 (3), 340-358.
