UWCScholar :: Browsing by Author "Lalu, Premesh"

Browsing by Author "Lalu, Premesh"

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Administrative death: Bureaucracy, capital punishment and governmentality in South Africa during the 1960s
(University of the Western Cape, 2018) van Laun, Bianca Paige; Lalu, Premesh
On 15December 2011, the now ousted South African President Jacob Zuma officiated the opening of the Gallows Memorial Museum at the Pretoria Central Correctional Facility, a project undertaken by the Department of Correctional Services. This Project saw the gallows at what was previously Pretoria Central Maximum (C-Max) Prison, which had been dismantled in 1996 following the abolition of the death penalty in South Africa, restored and reopened as a museum. At the top of the notorious 52 steps that condemned prisoners climbed to reach the execution room, the then president unveiled a dedicated wall with individualised plaques for each of the political prisoners who had died there between 1960 and 1989. �Today� the president announced, �all 134 names are officially being enshrined for eternity so that future generations will know what this country went through, so that we never go through a similar horror ever again. The Museum is meant to act as an anti-death penalty monument, to honour the anti-apartheid activists who were hanged by the apartheid state and to encourage �healing.� This was to be �a place where the political prisoners who were hanged there can be honoured and the past can be buried. Reflecting the African National Congress (hereafter ANC)- centered dominant narrative of resistance in South Africa, Zuma emphasised the executions of ANC cadres. He failed to note that the Pan Africanist Congress was the organisation that had lost the greatest number of its members to judicial executions.
Apartheid's university: Notes on the renewal of the Enlightenment
(CODESRIA, 2007) Lalu, Premesh
This paper sets to work on strategies for forging new and critical humanities at the institutional site of the university that appears to be trapped in the legacies of apartheid. The paper suggests that the university's responses to apartheid might hold the key for the realignment of its critical commitments in the post-apartheid present. Rather than merely invoking the Enlightenment traditions of the modern university as sufficient grounds for proclaiming a post-apartheid reorientation, I track the career of notions of academic freedom and university autonomy in the outlines of complicity. I show how the concepts of academic freedom and autonomy obscured a prior contract with the state and how that complicity extended a process of subjection. By deploying the postcolonial strategy of abusing the Enlightenment, the paper outlines the failure of opposing apartheid in the name of academic freedom and autonomy. That failure, I argue, resulted in an inability to investigate the relationship be�tween the university and the state and blinded the university to its role in the creation of racial subjects. Rather than merely casting the university in terms of the foundational concepts of academic freedom and university autonomy, I suggest that it might be more productive to consider the epistemological and political potential of a renewed reference to the Enlightenment. Apartheid's University, cast as continuity of the Enlightenment legacy, might allow us to rewrite its abject script in the direction of resisting the forms of subjection supported by that process of normalisation.
An archive of the future
(Jos� Frantz, 2020) Lalu, Premesh
The University of the Western Cape (UWC) recently entered into a partnership with photographer Rashid Lombard to house his substantial archival collection, which promises to offer expanded perspectives on the everyday cultural and political life of the Cape Flats. Consisting of a vast photographic record of Cape Flats history from the 1960s onwards, as well as an equally vast documentation of the history of jazz in South Africa, the Rashid Lombard Collection brings into view a hitherto repressed and often neglected feature of life under apartheid.
Athlone in mind
(University of the Western Cape, 2019) Grunebaum, Heidi; Campbell, Kurt; Lalu, Premesh
Breaking the mold of disciplinary area studies
(Indiana University Press, 2016) Lalu, Premesh
At the outset of an edited volume on Intellectuals and African Development, the question is posed about what went wrong.1 The call for self-reflection perhaps anticipates a further question�about how to account for the effects of area studies on scholarship in Africa in the era of independence and development. Much of this reflection has of course been occasioned by the work of scholars initially educated in African universities but later located in the American academy. Many have argued saliently about the perils of proceeding without significant and substantial overhauls to prevailing orthodoxies derived from area studies as they were constituted in the American academy. Perhaps one way to think about the anxieties produced by area studies for scholars of African studies relates to the manner in which the consolidation of institutions of higher learning in the West after the Second World War was buoyed by knowledge from elsewhere. Dipesh Chakrabarty, in his musings on American area studies in South Asia, identifies the asymmetry between knowledge and institution as a hangover of an older connection between liberal education and empire.2 He suggests that what made these Eurocentric assumptions invisible was in part the fact that area studies were still a matter of studying cultures that were foreign. The question is ultimately, what critical attitude is to be harnessed from within this scene of estrangement to articulate another perspective on the worldliness of knowledge that the late Edward Said once encouraged. Thinking about the inheritance of area studies after Said�s Orientalism or Valentine Mudimbe�s Invention of Africa is what now pressures a generation toward recharging the effective history of postcolonial criticism.
Digitisation, history, and the making of a postcolonial archive of Southern African liberation struggles
(Indiana University Press, 2005) Lalu, Premesh; Isaacman, Allen; Nygren, Tom
This paper describes the history of an initiative to digitize a postcolonial archive on the struggle for freedom in Southern Africa. The authors outline the intellectual architecture of the project and the complex epistemological, political, and technical challenges that they confronted in their endeavor to construct a digital archive that might help reorient scholarly debates on the struggle for liberation.
The enchantment of freedom at University of the Western Cape
(Jos� Frantz, 2020) Lalu, Premesh
The history of the modern university is ,first and foremost ,the history of the unfolding of complex problematics of a planetary condition through established scientific and humanistic inquiry. Defined as such, the work of the university is not only to advance solutions for those problems that interchangeably favour state and public use of reason but also to discover, in the framing of the problem, the very conditions for constructing perspectives about a future that is radically other. In this sense, the demand placed on the university is always doubled, so that its interpretive, analytical, and critical work cuts into the non-identity of past and future. To this extent, the ideals of higher education mimic the processes of research and define the relationship established between the professoriate, the student body, and the university�s allied publics. The scientific revolutions
Goema�s Refrain: Sonic anticipation and the Musicking Cape
(University of the Western Cape, 2019) Layne, Valmont; Lalu, Premesh
This thesis traces the making of a social world of the musicking Cape through sound, which it calls sonic anticipation. Sonic anticipation is threaded through a Cape-based musicking milieu called goema in the Nineteenth century, and through the regional jazzing culture that emerged in Cape Town in the latter part of the Twentieth century. A key concern is to read the sonic archive of Cape music without folding into a representational discourse of (apartheid) group identity or of a Cape exceptionalism. First, the thesis explores goema's emergence as folk music. In a central example, sonic anticipation is discernible in the intensities of a song called Daar Kom die Alibama [translated as �There Comes the Alibama�]. This song enabled goema to secure a status as racialised folk memory. Later in the Twentieth century, the song set the scene for a rearticulation that laid claim to the city as a response to the 'anxious urbanity' of race formation. This shift from the Nineteenth to Twentieth century musicking tradition is at the heart of what we have come to know as Cape jazz. In its genealogical construction of Cape jazz, the thesis traces a prefigurative aesthetics and politics that proposes new ways of thinking about the political significance of jazz. It traces the pedagogic strategies that musicians � Tem Hawker, Winston Mankunku, Robbie Jansen and Alex van Heerden - used in pursuing �ethical individuation� with this racialised folk memory. By the early 1960s, jazz had become a method �archive� or formative canon for these musicians. The thesis outlines how musicians used �nomadic� pedagogies; following the energies that moved through the city, inside the technological, and discursive formations by which the social world was made. This thesis on goema�s refrain and the musicking Cape offers a way to consider a �difference that is not apartheid�s difference�.
The grammar of domination and the subjection of agency: colonial texts and modes of evidence
(Blackwell Publishing) Lalu, Premesh
This article focuses on colonial accounts of the killing of the Xhosa chief, Hintsa, in 1835 at the hands of British forces along what came to be known as the Eastern Cape frontier. It explores the evidentiary procedures and protocols through which the event came to be narrated in colonial frames of intelligibility. In proposing a strategy for reading the colo�nial archive, the paper strategically interrupts the flow from an apartheid historiography to what is commonly referred to as "alternative history." The aim in effecting this interrup�tion is to call attention to the enabling possibilities of critical history. This is achieved not by way of declaration but rather through a practice whereby the foundational category of evidence is problematized. The paper alludes to the limits of alternative history and its approaches to evidence on the one hand, and the conditions of complicity within which evidence is produced on the other. Whereas alternative history identifies its task as one of re-writing South African history, critical history, it is suggested, offers the opportunity to reconstitute the field of history by addressing the sites of its production and also its prac�tices. In exploring the production of the colonial record on the killing of Hintsa, the paper seeks to complicate alternative history's slippage in and out of the evidentiary rules estab�lished by colonial domination even as it constitutes the category of evidence as an object for a politics of history of the present.
The hand and the head: the handspring puppet company and the arts archive
(University of the Western Cape, 2021) Minkley, Emma Smith; Lalu, Premesh
My Doctoral dissertation, titled The hand and the head: The Handspring Puppet Company and the arts archive, is focussed on the hand as it appears variously in the production, performance and reception of puppetry as a metonym of care and comfort, but conversely of manipulation and tyranny. The shared proponent of the hand, so crucial to the puppeteer as a means of controlling the movements and �life� of the puppet, acts as the object of study which links the puppet to the modern human and the human body, both through means of creation and representation, in other words, both aesthetically and ontologically. The study thus initiates a set of dialectical connections between body and mind, intuition and intellect, practice and theory, all centred on the relationship between the hand and the head.
The historical productions of Cecil John Rhodes in 20th century Cape Town
(University of the Western Cape, 2005) Mdudumane, Khayalethu; Lalu, Premesh; Dept. of History; Faculty of Arts
This thesis analysed the historical productions of Rhodes in 20th century Cape Town. The critique of this study was that Cape Town embodies the history of imperialism in maintaining the memory of Rhodes. The thesis examined the following sites: Rhodes Cottage Museum, Rhodes Groote Schuur minor house, Rhodes Memorial and two statues, one in the Company Gardens at Cape Town and the other at the University of Cape Town.
The Impasse of Violence : writing necklacing into a history of liberation struggle in South Africa
(University of the Western Cape, 2010) Moosage, Riedwaan; Rousseau, Nicky; Lalu, Premesh; Dept. of History; Faculty of Arts
This thesis falls within the category of historical studies that is concerned with a difficult legacy of South Africa's liberation struggle, namely the practice of necklacing that accompanied it. My interest in the practice is limited to its emergence and politicizing as it relates to the ANC, the UDF and the apartheid state. The ANC and the UDF overwhelmingly understood the practice as resistance, yet ambivalently so. The question guiding this thesis therefore asks: how is necklacing written into the narrative of struggle history? Here I refer to its (re)representation, its (re)characterization, its (re)articulation in a wider discursive war of propaganda strategies that was waged through the interplay of an apartheid state discourse and what I consider to be an official non-state discourse, that of the ANC and the UDF.
Incomplete histories: Steve Biko, the politics of self-writing and the apparatus of reading
(Southern African Literature and Culture Centre, UKZN, 2004) Lalu, Premesh
This paper gathers together deliberations surrounding Steve Biko�s I Write What I Like as it simultaneously registers the critical importance of the text as an incomplete history. Rather than presupposing the text as a form of biography or following a trend of translating Biko into a prophet of reconciliation, I argue that the text leads us towards the postcolonial problematic of self-writing. That problematic, I argue, names the encounter between self-writing and an apparatus of reading. The paper stages the encounter as a way to make explicit the text�s postcolonial interests and to mark the onset of an incomplete history. This, I argue incidentally, is where the postcolonial critic may set to work to finish the critique of apartheid. Incomplete histories call attention to how that which is unintelligible in a text makes an authoritative reading difficult.
Journeys from the horizons of history: Text, trial and tales in the construction of narratives of pain
(Southern African Literature and Culture Centre, UKZN) Lalu, Premesh; Harris, Brent
This article draws inspiration from Jauss's theorisation of the concepts of horizon, reception, and construction. The problem we confront relates to the way we receive, interpret, and apply texts without cognisance of the ways our horizons advance, limit, and intersect with a multiplicity of meanings that might not have been foreseen by the text's contemporaries. What are the distances between public encounters with the past on the one hand, and on the other the testimonies heard by the Commission or readings of trauma offered by social scientists and historians? In this paper we wish to offer a tentative response to this question by reflecting on various readings of the trial of Andrew Zondo and the public testimony of Lephina Zondo at the TRC. We are interested in the ways in which truths, and histories, are produced "by virtue of multiple forms of constraint".
Little Amal
(Jos� Frantz, 2020) Lalu, Premesh
When South Africa celebrated Heritage Day this year, Boschendal Estate in Franschhoek provided an ideal backdrop for the first steps of Little Amal, a three-metre puppet created by the Handspring Puppet Company from South Africa to represent the plight of a refugee child. Guided by puppeteers from Ukwanda Puppetry and Design Collective of the Centre for Humanities Research (CHR) at the University of the Western Cape, Little Amal took the first steps of what promises to be a spectacular international event as she will embark on a 8 000 kilometre walk across Europe in 2021
Looking for Ned
(University of the Western Cape, 2019) Lalu, Premesh
Film by Premesh Lalu
Producing Sarhili: the colonial archive and the biographical limits of writing a history of a nineteenth century Xhosa king
(2010) Slade, Virgil Charles; Lalu, Premesh
Revisiting Mhlontlo and his legacy
(University of the Western Cape, 2017) Ndzuzo, Luvuyo; Lalu, Premesh
The study attempts to recover the figure of King Charles Mhlontlo who fell out of favor with his colonial masters after he resisted going to war against his neighbors during the debacle that led to the killing of Hamilton Hope, magistrate of Qumbu in 1880. Three elements are explored in the study. Firstly, I consider the contested figure of Mhlontlo and how history writing presented and represented Mhlontlo in particular ways. Secondly, I consider the presentation and representation of Mhlontlo with regard to the death of Hope in the archive and the traditions of history writing that defines the king as a contested figure in the works of history. Thirdly, I consider the particular tensions of remembering the past and how it is recorded brought to the fore as a continuation to a Whig concept of history and how South Africa especially the New South Africa tried to deal with the question of state and kingship in terms of such an historiographical inheritance. At the heart of my interest in the Mpondomise king is the question of how we are to read the post-apartheid state's independent commission of enquiry' called the Nhlapo Commission that ruled on the future of relationships between the monarchy and democratic institutions. The study questions the stance of the democratic state in how it dealt with the question of traditional leadership by tracing its emergence in the complex genealogy of the inheritance of Whig History.
Sara's suicide: History and the representational limit
(University of the Western Cape, 2000) Lalu, Premesh
This paper deals with cognitive failures and historiographical blind spots in legal and historical representations of the colonised subject. It concerns an archival fragment from the seventeenth century - the suicide of a young woman called Sara in the period of Dutch rule at the Cape. The paper focuses on the production of evidentiary sources and examines the mediations by which a colonial text on subalterns becomes available to the present
The sound of war: Apartheid, audibility, and resonance
(University of the Western Cape, 2018) Erasmus, Aidan; Lalu, Premesh
This study approaches the field of military history with approaches to the study of sound in order to interrogate the concept of war that underpins military historiography as a disciplinary formation. It delineates the notion of the phonographic attitude with which to think about the ways in which technology, war, and the senses coalesce in broader historical writing about war, colonialism, and apartheid in South Africa. In so doing, it suggests that an attention to what it calls the warring motifs is necessary if a reorientation of a reading of war and apartheid away from a politics of deadness is to be achieved. It does so through a methodological approach that attends to various objects in South African historiography that may be attended to differently through an emphasis on the sensorial. These include the state-sponsored Walkman bomb that killed ANC lawyer Bheki Mlangeni, a record produced by artist Roger Lucey in memory of the death of activist Lungile Tabalaza, the supposed whistle or shout that led the indigenous Khoikhoi to victory over the Portuguese in 1510, a lithographic print by William Kentridge named after a radio programme for troops engaged in South Africa�s border war, the bell of sunken troopship SS Mendi, and the first recording of the hymn �Nkosi Sikelel� iAfrika� by intellectual and key figure in a history of nationalism in South Africa, Sol T Plaatje.

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