3 - A Dialectics of Un/homing: Rethinking the 1990s 'transitions' in Memories of Anti-apartheid and Soviet daughters

The end of the Cold War entailed not only the emergence of new nations, postcolonial and postsocialist, but also large-scale migrations and displacement. In some cases, such as South Africa, these involved the long-awaited return of exiles; in other, across spaces of the former Soviet Union, it was often movement from ethnically diverse regions to now ‘purified’ nations. Despite multiple differences between these contexts and processes, the tropes of transition as a return to ‘normality’ and national homecoming were used across different parts of the world that could be called ‘postsocialist’. The worldwide ‘territorializing’ force of such ideologems, entwined with neoliberal globalization, suggests that new critical vocabularies can emerge through tracing and interrelating local strategies of resistance – generated on nations’ margins – across regions. 

I engage with the ways in which contemporary writing by authors who experienced those dis/placements as children rethinks narratives of normalization through personal and generational memories. My reading juxtaposes a memoir by South African journalist Sisonke Msimang, Always Another Country, and an autotheoretical text How to Love a Homeland by Russian philosopher Oxana Timofeeva. Both authors experienced ‘transitions’ as settling in the respective nations but also as a departure from the communist and anti-apartheid worldviews with which they had been growing up. Both write from migrant locations and attempt to imagine forms of (universal) multiple belonging by interrogating developmental time. I reflect on their use of embodied memory for thinking trans/national connection dialectically and the possibility of postcolonial/postimperial vocabularies for mediating such dialectics of un/homing.