Translations: Lenin's Statues, Post-communism and Post-apartheid

Abstract

Using Ivan Vladislavic's short story "Propaganda by Monuments" as a starting point, this article explores the trope of the spatial and cultural "translation" of a statue representing Lenin from one socio-political and historical background into another. This movement illuminates the connections and dissimilarities between post-communist Russia and post-apartheid South Africa. The statue's imaginary voyage not only reveals the workings of an increasingly globalized market, it also brings into contact two cultures at a time of transition (South Africa and the post-soviet world of the 1990s) and two critical discourses (post-colonialism and post-communism) at a time of theoretical revamping.

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