ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the Coloured community of South Africa's Western Cape Province, in order to explore the 'reappropriation' of an identity and the re-imagining of a community post-apartheid. It connects to the complexities of remembering and rewriting history from a traumatic context. Drawing on B. Misztal's premise that collective memory is a negotiation, and that there is a 'relationship between remembering and transformation' the chapter traces the contours of an ongoing negotiation between what is known of the past, and contemporary social and political agendas. It does so through the examination and explication of the various discourses, grammars and narratives that form a social framework for memory; exploring how this memory-making process works towards a transformation that contributes to aspects of a Coloured identity. The chapter draws on narrativized constructions of collective memory that exist in a close and dynamic, dialogical relationship with individual memories.
