Stored Virtue

When I recently visited the justly famous District 6 Museum in Capetown I was assailed by a white prehistoric archaeologist who – for reasons I struggled to fathom – went to great lengths to persuade me that the human genome project would help to clarify the confused politics of race and identity in South Africa by at last giving identity a fixed genealogy anchored in the subterranean history of the body. The very suggestion seemed out of place in an institution that is committed to repairing a fractured sense of local identity through a culturally fabricated form of remembering. By reassembling the fragments of a shattered history, the District 6 Museum aims to restore a thread of connection between the vibrant multicultural community that District 6 had once been, before its inhabitants were removed to the townships and their homes razed to the ground, and that which, as the area is rebuilt, it might once again become. How, I thought, could the archaeologist’s view of the relations between the body, memory, race and identity be of help here? For it implied that, once they had been assigned a molecular ancestry, people would wake up and remember who they really were, and had been all along, quite independently of any cultural fashioning of the relations between memory and identity. Yet the currency of such conceptions is not limited to white fantasists. There is also a strong tendency, in current critiques of antiessentialist conceptions of race and identity, to ascribe racial identity to a shared memory rooted in the ancestral history of the body. Paul Gilroy comments on this in his criticism of Elizabeth Alexander for interpreting a 1994 Whitney Museum exhibition of artistic representations of black males to suggest that the flayed and mutilated black bodies on display reflected ‘a “text carried in the flesh” composed of “ancestral” memories of terror’, thereby evoking a ‘shared racial memory’. ¹ How, Gilroy asks, can there be an active politics of memory if the ‘bottom line’ of black identity is lodged within ‘the memory tape carried in those black cells’? ²