In three short stories—“Propaganda by Monuments,” “The WHITES ONLY Bench,” and “Courage”—and in his novel The Restless Supermarket, Ivan Vladislavic dramatizes the problems facing South African culture in its attempts to memorialize a violent and traumatic past. These texts suggest a skepticism about the capacity of monuments and memorials to convey an authentic past. Restless Supermarket in particular reveals the complex ways in which memory and consciousness are mapped onto space and place in the aftermath of apartheid, and explores the spatio-temporal implications of postmodern “urban palimpsests” for the inscription of memory and identity.