Abstract

The aim of this research is look at the South African context as represented in the film and to argue that Chappie’s “identity” is not only formed from his presentist, experiential context (born into criminal violence) of his individual traumas but also from his inherited trauma. A trauma which Ron Eyerman terms a collective “tear in the social fabric” or a “societal wound” (2004, 4). Which, in this particular case, is that of apartheid and colonial traumas.