Identity and Community Solidarity: Counter-Spectacle, Power and Resistance in the Mass Funeral of the 'Guguleteu Seven', March 15, 1986

This dissertation is concerned with the funeral of the "Guguletu Seven," staged by members of the South African resistance on March 15, 1986 in the township of Guguletu. An example of counter-spectacle, the funeral will be treated as a discursive event, a process in and through which a temporary shift in power-relations was effected, contributing to the consolidation of a resistance community that eventually led to the overthrow of the apartheid regime in South Africa in 1994. The funeral, ephemeral in nature, is represented in discourse through texts and images from the South African and the American press. The entire funeral cannot be reconstituted, so that certain semiotic themes will be emphasized: the Guguletu seven as martyrs and Mandela as leader in exile. Key to this study is a discussion of the component parts of the spectacular event, with its heterogeneous mass of subjects (children, women, and men of different ages and races---"white," "black," "Coloured," and "Indian") with different affiliations (from the armed branch of the African National Congress to workers' unions and student organizations) provisionally cohering as a crowd around the bodies of the newest martyrs to the anti-apartheid cause. A detailed analysis of the mourners' forms of dress, including para-military attire, will be followed by discussion of the banners that were displayed, with signs, symbols, and text appropriated from various forms of state spectacle. Key to my analysis is the concept of performativity; the dissertation, then, will also take up the coded acts of the participating subjects, including acts of speech and gesture that are similar to ritual in their conventionality and iterability. I will argue that these signs, symbols and forms of dress, gesture and speech have associations with the modern state in its various and often incommensurable manifestations (from capitalist to state socialist), as well as with other resistance-movements in the second half of the twentieth century. Their operation in the meaning-event of this funeral, I shall argue, reveals that meaning does not inhere in the signs themselves, but is consolidated relationally and performatively, at the level of production as well as reception.