Browsing by Author "Minkley, Gary"

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    Popular history in South Africa in the 198Os: the politics of production
    (University of the Western Cape, 1994) Rousseau, Nicky; Minkley, Gary; Witz, Lesley
    Popular history, like indeed other histories, is informed by different ideas about the relationship between the past, the present and the political uses of history. However, a major problem in trying to explore these ideas as they developed in South Africa in the period under review, is that they remain for the large part embedded in popular history texts. A consistent and conscious theorisation has not been much evident - at least not at a published level. The triennial conferences of the WHW are thus perhaps unique in the opportunity they accorded to projects to reflect on their experiences and more generally to raise issues and debates relating to popularisation. At the same time, and perhaps precisely because it was one of the few arena6 where such reflection was happening, the relative paucity of research to emerge from these quarters is particularly regrettable. while not all would agree with Crais' assertion that the programmatic separation of the popularisation section2 from the mainstream academic one resulted in "exclusionary practices"3, it does seem undeniable that they enjoyed a different and lesser status.
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    Red assembly: The work remains
    (Published by History Department, University of the Western Cape, 2016) Witz, Leslie; Pohlandt-McCormick, Helena; Minkley, Gary; Mowitt, John
    The work that emerged from the encounter with Red, an art installation by Simon Gush and his collaborators, in the workshop �Red Assembly�, held in East London in August 2015, is assembled here in Kronos, the journal of southern African histories based at the University of the Western Cape, and previously in parallax, the cultural studies journal based at the University of Leeds published in May 2016. What is presented there and here is not simply more work, work that follows, or even additional works. Rather, it is the work that arises as a response to a question that structured our entire project: does Red, now also installed in these two journals, have the potential to call the discourse of history into question? This article responds to this question through several pairings: theft � gift; copy � rights; time � history; kronos � chronos. Here we identify a reversal in this installation of the gift into the commodity, and another with regard to conventional historical narratives which privilege the search for sources and origins. A difference between (the historian�s search for) origination and (the artist�s) originality becomes visible in a conversation between and over the historic and the artistic that does not simply try to rescue History by means of the work of art. It is in this sense that we invite the displacements, detours, and paths made possible through Simon Gush�s Red, the �Red Assembly� workshop and the work/ gift of installation and parallaxing. To gesture beyond �histories� is the provocation to which art is neither cause nor effect. Thinking with the work of art, that is, grasping thought in the working of art, has extended the sense of history�s limit and the way the limit of history is installed. What to do at this limit, at the transgressive encounter between saying yes and no to history, remains the challenge. It is the very challenge of what insistently remains.
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    With shouts of Afrika!�: The 1952 textile strike at good hope textiles, King William's town
    (Social Dynamics, 1990) Minkley, Gary
    This paper, through a detailed examination of one of the biggest and most significant strikes in the East London region, suggests its importance lies both in the events and processes of the strike itself, and in its longer term impact on political traditions of union and popular struggle. It argues that a dynamic relationship developed between a newly emergent industrial working class in the textile industry, and an equally rapidly established local ATWIU, and local ANC branch. This resulted in the merging of a pattern of worker discontent and strike action with the ANCs Defiance Campaign in particular, and in so doing, the nature and direction of the strike was transformed. Finally it is argued that the defeat of this �mass� strike of defiance by the textile workers, laid the patterns and built the disillusions of future labour struggles in the region. � 1990 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.