Affective return: anachronistic feeling and contemporary South African documentary form

This paper turns to the critically entangled terms of form and feeling as a basis for exploring post-2012 South African protest and visual cultures. Against the backdrop of a newly ascendant political vernacular characterised by the reluctance to dichotomise emotion and reason in negotiating the terms of contemporary dissent, I examine specifically how the consequences of political disenchantment are affectively negotiated in and through documentary form. Films such as The People Versus The Rainbow Nation Nelson Mandela: The Myth and Me Miners Shot Down and Strike a Rock have recently come to exemplify what Rob Nixon calls “the versatile possibilities of politically engaged nonfiction”. Taking Nelson Mandela: The Myth and Me and The People Versus The Rainbow Nation as case studies, I trace the historicity and aesthetic structures embedded in those aspects of the post-2012 South African documentary image that might be said not only to move viewers, but to be constitutive of each film’s formal arrangement. The films convey the entanglement of documentary intelligibility and feeling in ways that are particularly pertinent to making sense of the contemporary South African “liberation reimagined”.