According to the editors of the book, “the book recognises and confronts [the] complex history of racialised oppression, as well as the future possibilities and impossibilities of transforming South African society through a re-engagement with the apartheid archive – an archive that allows us to understand the continued impact of the past on our present social, subjective and psychological realities.

“Because it is a psychosocial approach (that is uniquely suited to the socio-historical and psychological analysis of racism), the book relies mainly on the memories, stories and narratives of ordinary people, submitted to the Apartheid Archive Project, as its source material.

“It provokes us into thinking about racism as grounded as much in affective as in macro-political means, in the functioning of both intra-psychic and material forms, perpetuated as much in private as in institutional domains,” the editors explain.