Introduction. Remembering Transitions: Approaching Memories in/of Crisis

Acknowledgments: I'm grateful to the colleagues who shared their thoughts and feedback on drafts of this chapter, especially Ioana Luca, Kylie Thomas, and Kevin Platt.

Querying transitions

This volume probes the ambiguous meanings of the 1970-1990s political 'transitions' across postsocialist, postapartheid, and postdictatorship contexts. I begin the introduction to this collection by discussing two poems - one by South African poet Tumelo Khoza and the other by Russian/Ukrainian poet Galina Rymbu. Although they may seem an unlikely pair, these poems represent the entangled desires to forget, to recover, and to question the solidified or ignored meanings of the historical turning point of transition and the evolution of these meanings over time.

There's a teenage boy / who presently chills at

the corner / where the future intersects with our

history, his name is Democracy / he's forever

mumbling what sounds like poetry / forever

high on a spliff of our dis(joint)ed society /

forever sniffs on the stiff aroma of whiskey /

counting how many governing bodies make the

front page daily.

This stanza of Khoza's (2017) poem "Democracy" opens a collection showcasing the work of young spoken-word South African poets.1 Speaking about the experiences of the so-called 'born free' generation - those born during or soon after South Africa's transition to democracy in the 1990s - the poems confront head-on the failure of the postapartheid state to improve the lives of the majority. Among the symptoms of the new generation's dis-ease with the contemporary moral economy, the poem mentions the elites' "revolutionary hypocrisy" and overall "obsess[ion] with the honey of money," which is underpinned by the routine "forget[ting]" of "what happens in the rural vicinity" and, more broadly, to all those who have no access to economic and cultural resources. This poem, like many in the collection, expresses the discontent of the time. It resounds with the student protests that took place across the country in 2015 and 2016, starting with action for decolonizing university campuses and curricula and then extending to resistance against the socioeconomic policies of universities, which included the lack of proper housing and the outsourcing of workers, and ultimately to protest against the state. The poem also signifies the despondency of a generation faced with the predicament of chronic unemployment and, more generally, at the resentment of the dispossessed, which may break out in violence.2

[.] such leaves

Democracy angry / it leaves him tearing his

book of rhymes in fury / because no one wants

to listen to him as he speaks whole-heatedly /

so Democracy lights a ciggie and chills by his

corner silently with his container of gasoline / he

folds his country flag neatly / slowly takes a drag /

pours the gas / lights another match and utters,

"Phuck this man!" (Khoza 2017)

The extreme indifference and cynicism with regard to any talk about law or democracy is also the context reflected on by Rymbu (2020),3 for instance in "The Law is Not in Force Here":

The law is not in force here

and constitution will not save us from pain

or hatred. I have only two hours of free time

to write this - from 5 to 7 am.

The rest of the time doesn't belong me,

just like the law. Constitution has never 'belong to me'

Guaranteed safety

For me or my family,

We were hiding under a blanket every time something happened (85).4

These lines convey the enormous gap between appeals to constitutional rights and the reality of lives among the majority of people in Russia. They, and especially the underbelly sketched in this poem, do not encounter or perceive the Law, just like the Constitution does not recognize who these people are and how they live, since it does not acknowledge their daily pain and deprivation. The poem was part of a writing project - a collective reflection on the event of introducing amendments to the Constitution in 2020 - which resulted in a series of texts titled Constitution Passion.5 The amendments proposed by the Russian president and legitimized through a national referendum conducted in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic included several conservative and populist positions - most importantly, the 'nullification' of the presidential terms served by Vladimir Putin, which, therefore, allows him to be elected again. This event, along with the intensified neo-traditionalism and violence of biopolitical power in Russia and the expulsion of oppositional voices, has generated a state of hopelessness; but it has also, as we see from the writing project that resulted in Constitution Passion, generated a wish to explore the meanings of the Constitution and, more particularly, its relationship to daily life. Passed into law in 1993, during the 'transition period,' the Constitution points to a time of hope for new, democratic beginnings6 and, simultaneously, to the time when precisely this future appeared to be foreclosed as the then President Boris Yeltsin used military force to suppress opposition to his fast-paced economic reforms. The Constitution that was subsequently adopted, thus, already incorporated the fundamental contradiction between the rhetoric of democracy and the concentration of power in the hands of the president enshrined in this document.

Both poems are writings in crisis. From this viewpoint in the present, they re-envision the past of transition as a time of crisis too; this nurtures a dialectic of ends and beginnings, of hoped-for possibilities and their foreclosures, and of the institution and the subversion of democratic principles. The poems are also interrelated through their imagery and structures of affect. At the core of both is the complete disconnection between the states (and the elites) and the masses ('the people' who should be the subjects of democracy and constitutional protection). Instead of the more familiar voices of politicians or intellectuals speaking for or against transitions from public platforms, the poems speak with those who are unseen and unheard by the latter; their voices and gestures, rendered in this poetry of the everyday, are disconcerting and uncanny. These subjects hold the power to negate and destroy everything as they have nothing to lose; yet, they remain downtrodden and "beaten up again" (Rymbu 2020, 89). Other aspects that interconnect these poems are their tone of urgency and the perceived necessity of reckoning with the past of transitions, as well as the sharpness of their critique and the power of affect. But they also reach beyond "the politics of impatience" (Mbembe 2015) as their insistent questioning does not merely mediate feelings of betrayal; it inquires into the subjectivity of those who feel betrayed, particularly among the dispossessed, and into the social conditioning of this being and feeling.

Such sensibilities, generationally specific or not, whether characterized by "cruel optimism" (Berlant 2011) or longing for a revolution, are global in their scope and resonance; they are the signs of our crisis-ridden, discontented, and seemingly future-less times. But they have a particular urgency, as this volume proposes and outlines through a variety of cases, in societies that underwent transitions from authoritarian regimes of different kinds during the late 1970s to the early 1990s (for example, state socialist governments, military dictatorships, colonial and apartheid regimes with variations, of course, within these categories). In these societies, the appeal to the moral narratives of overcoming the politics and legacies of repressive authoritarianism is especially strong as it is grounded in experiences and memories of the recent past, either directly or mediated through positive narratives of transformation in education, media, and cultural production. In other words, the ideals of democratic transformation in these societies (also in those cases where they have been seriously compromised from the very start of the transitions) are alive and serve as a meaningful reference point and cultural resource. Furthermore, through the narratives and practices of transitional justice, references to the transitions (particularly those framed as the success stories of Germany, Poland, or South Africa) have been circulating globally in recent decades as transitions have been carried out, or attempted, in places such as Rwanda, Bosnia, Cuba, Iraq, Tunisia, and Colombia. At the same time, scholars have...