Rory Bester
Address: P.O. Box 91023 , Auckland Park 2006, South Africa
Affiliation: Constitution of Public Intellectual Life Research Project
Graduate School for the Humanities and Social Sciences
Wits University , Johannesburg
Email: besterr@hse.pg.wits.ac.za
Abstract
South Africa is a country whose history has been profoundly shaped by migration. Apartheid was distinct in its obsessive codification of a system of forced migration at every moment of everyday life. This experience of forced migration – in the way that it instinctively excludes and forcibly relocates ‘strangeness' – was and remains an integral part of South Africa's collective psyche. The notion of diaspora, unlike migration, is something less familiar to South Africans. With the arrival in South Africa of large numbers of peoples from especially west and central Africa over the last ten years, distinct diasporic communities began to emerge out of a landscape dominated by a politics of forced migration. This has placed South Africa 's cultural landscape at a critical juncture where the legacy of visual articulations of migration is colliding with emerging voices about diasporic belonging. While it is difficult to isolate the point at which migrants, in the practice of their everyday lives, are no longer only from “elsewhere” but rather inhabit a diasporic “here-ness”, contests over space, body and ritual make this arena important for reflections on where migration has come from and where diaspora is going. This paper explores the ways in which selected filmmakers and photographers have increasing begun to both recognize a transitional space between migration to diaspora and critically explore how this space influences understandings of the relationship between the visual identities of migration and diaspora.