ABSTRACT
This chapter talks about the endurance of historical time, or what Rose captures in the acknowledgement that “the past has not gone away”. It deals with the themes of temporality, memory, continuity and justice that Rose invokes throughout her essay. Rose’s text is replete with instructive signposts in this regard: “lasting traumas of the nation”; “torn fabric of South African history”, “continuing struggle”, “enduring and troubling legacies”, “ongoing histories”, “historic and persisting division”, “enduring obduracy”. The scene of post-1994 South Africa that Rose sketches under the title of “The Legacy” is one overwrought by the unbearable weight of its history and present of ongoing racial unfreedom and non-belonging. Crucially, the concept, term and idea of “the afterlife” derives its narrative energies and discursive intuition from critical race theory’s insight that economies of racial power reinvent themselves rather than terminate in temporal and political shifts.
