ABSTRACT

This article considers the ways in which characters are presented as “out of place” in different apartheid city spaces in anti-apartheid era films of the late 1980s: A Dry White Season (1989, dir. Euzhan Palcy) and Mapantsula (1988, dir. Oliver Schmitz) and, to a lesser degree, Cry Freedom (1987, dir. Richard Attenborough). The article explores the manner in which the protagonists relate to each other through interracial friendship, relationality and mobility in the domestic spaces of cities and townships. It reads these relations as occupying and redefining apartheid sensibilities in distinct ways that filter into how postapartheid sensibilities are and can be navigated. The paper thus grapples with how seemingly fixed apartheid spaces and characters in the films can also be part of complex, real-life repositionings of racial identities in postapartheid South Africa that are not always clear and/or neat. The paper therefore argues that through their representations of the past, these films perform memory work and map our memories and historical constructions of apartheid.

摘要

本文考虑了在 1980 年代后期的反种族隔离时代电影中，不同种族隔离城市空间中人物被呈现为“不合时宜”的方式：A Dry White Season（1989，导演 Euzhan Palcy）和Mapantsula（1988，导演） . Oliver Schmitz），以及在较小程度上，Cry Freedom（1987 年，导演。理查德·阿滕伯勒）。这篇文章探讨了主角在城市和乡镇的家庭空间中通过跨种族友谊、关系和流动性相互联系的方式。它将这些关系解读为以不同的方式占据和重新定义种族隔离的敏感性，过滤后种族隔离的敏感性是如何并且可以如何导航的。因此，这篇论文探讨了电影中看似固定的种族隔离空间和角色如何也可能成为种族隔离后南非种族身份复杂、现实重新定位的一部分，这些重新定位并不总是清晰和/或整洁的。因此，该论文认为，通过他们对过去的再现，这些电影进行了记忆工作，并映射了我们的记忆和种族隔离的历史建构。