Forced Removals as Sites/Sights of Historical Trauma in South African Writing of the 1980s and 1990s

The present essay/chapter deals with the representation of forced removals in South African writings of the 1980s and 1990s, with the aim of exploring not so much collective trauma as such – certainly not from a clinical perspective – but of analysing those specific literary representations of trauma within a historical reality that resembles a concentrationary universe. Clearly, townships and squatter camps in the South Africa of the apartheid era cannot be compared to Nazi concentration camps. Nevertheless, as socio-politically enclosed and segregated spaces, and as geographically insulated places, they respond to the same Foucauldian logic of discipline and power, of control and limitation of freedom, that are typical of prisons as well as of concentrationary universes. Cathy Caruth's Trauma Theory will help analysing texts by Nobel Prize winner J.M. Coetzee, M. Tlali, A. Fugard, A. Dangor.