Research Articles

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Since its inception in 2006, the Centre for Humanities Research (CHR) at the University of the Western Cape has emerged as a crucial meeting point for researchers in the Humanities and Social Sciences throughout Southern Africa. The Centre strives to develop unifying and interdisciplinary themes in the humanities that will enable a renewal of its study in Africa.

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Staging historical argument: History I at the University of the Western Cape
(Routledge, 1996) Lalu, Premesh
This article focuses on the lecture-room debates which have been the central feature of the first-year history course at the University of the Western Cape (UWC) since 1993. The UWC History Department takes the position that in first-year teaching the main aim should be to show students that the discipline is always contested and to introduce them to historical argument. The article makes a case for these lecture-room debates as a developmental sequence or series for the induction of first-year UWC students into historical argument in discussion, reading and writing.
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
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.
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 virtual stampede for Africa: Digitisation, postcoloniality and archives of the liberation struggles in Southern Africa
(University of KwaZulu-Natal, 2007) Lalu, Premesh
This article presents a polemical argument for a politics of digitisation that aims to politicise the archival disciplines while making sense of the conjuncture in which digitisation initiatives are mooted in Southern Africa. It argues for a blurring of the work of archivist and historian in reconstituting the archive of the liberation struggle. It alters the paradigmatic frameworks of the Cold War that have hitherto defined the structure of the archive. The article provisionally anticipates the trajectories of a politics of digitisation, while complicating our notion of information by tracking its emergence in colonialism and the restrictive paradigms of the Cold War. Calling for a constitution of the archive that undercuts both colonial precedents and Cold War paradigms, it argues for a politics of digitisation that will expand what can be said about the history of liberation struggles in Southern Africa by redefining the meaning of the postcolonial. The realignment is intended to provoke new conceptualisations of globalisation and the archive in the postcolony.
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.
When was South African history ever postcolonial?
(History Department, UWC, 2008) Lalu, Premesh
In this article I argue that what enabled affiliation to the larger political project against apartheid was precisely the production of a subject that was always, and necessarily, threaded through a structure of racial capitalism. This hinders the emergence of a history of colonialism and nationalism that theorises and historicises the relations of knowledge and power.In what I am calling a postcolonial critique of apartheid, I make explicit the way the question of knowledge and power was often exchanged for historicist constructions of historical change, especially in relation to the transition from the apartheid to the postapartheid. Tangential to my argument is a reminder of the way the native question in the first half of the twentieth-century produced a disciplinary upheaval in South African knowledge projects by combining the impulses drawn from colonial discourse and nationalist anti-colonial narration. Herein we might encounter the problem of South African radical historiography, and its concomitant constructions of the postapartheid.
Crime, community and the governance of violence in post-apartheid South Africa
(Taylor and Francis Group, 2008) Pillay, Suren
The South African government has embarked on a programme ofencouraging social cohesion in South Africa first to address concerns stemmingfrom high levels of violent crime which characterise the society, and second, tofoster positive national identity in a complex, heterogeneous, racialised andstratified nation. Through a discussion of the impact of violent crime on emergentforms of community, this paper argues that the practices of communities evolvingin the post-apartheid period show tendencies toward fragmentation rather thanunification, undermining efforts of �nation-building�.
Uncontained and the Constraints of Historicism as Method: A reply to Mario Pissarra
(Africa South Art Initiative (ASAI), 2013) Grunebaum, Heidi
Mario Pissarra�s rigorous and considered critical review of Uncontained: Opening the Community Arts Project archive (2012) marks a significant contribution to starting a discussion that the book and exhibition aimed to provoke. That an interlocutor of his authority has undertaken such an attentive and thoughtful critique does the publication a great service and opens up pathways for further conversation and work on the Community Arts Project (CAP) art collection at the University of the Western Cape (UWC). I would like to reciprocate in a similar vein and take up Third Text Africa�s invitation to respond to Pissarra�s review by thinking about the merits and limits of his critique.
Anxious urbanity: xenophobia, the native subject and the refugee camp
(Routledge Taylor Francis Group, 2013) Pillay, Suren
Could we think of the black subject under apartheid as a refugee, and might this condition be the paradigmatic metaphor for thinking about the postcolonial African predicament of citizenship? This paper considers the xenophobic violence that occurred in South Africa in 2008 and recasts that event by thinking about the plight of the refugee as part of what it argues is a genealogy of �anxious urbanity.� This, the paper suggests, has defined the urban subject of colonial and apartheid modes of governmentality and has consequences for how we think about the postcolonial present of citizenship.
Empathy�s echo: post-apartheid fellow feeling
(Taylor & Francis, 2016) Truscott, Ross
The concept of empathy has been set to work, across a range of fields, to mark a break with the relational patterns of apartheid. Similarly, empathy has been identified, historically, as that which, within apartheid and colonial rule more generally, exceeded or escaped relations of domination. This paper approaches the discourse of empathy from a different angle, taking empathy as a concept embedded in colonial thinking. Given that so many claims to empathy have had recourse to psychoanalysis, the paper focuses on empathy in Freud�s work, specifically Dora�s case and Freud�s analysis of Michelangelo�s Moses, which are read alongside the images and installations of contemporary South African artist, Nandipha Mntambo, in particular her collection of images and installations in The Encounter. Three scenes are conjured wherein empathy confronts its impossibility, but rather than foreclose on empathy as a postapartheid condition, it is through the disclosure of the aporias of empathy that it might be brought into the realm of the ethical through a practice of reinscription and through the figure of Echo.
The �Rough edge of deterritorialisation�: Contemplation
(Taylor & Francis, 2016) van Bever Donker, Maurits
To frame this paper, which given its focus on the installation Red should ostensibly deal with a question of aesthetics and technology, with an epigraph that situates the contemplative capacity of a cow alongside the echo of the damned, is perhaps a little strange. It is this haunting echo, however, that asks for a re-working of contemplation and that finds a resonance in the effect evoked through �Red�, an effect that draws out the rumbling of the non-Western in the frame of Western philosophy.2 Rather than approach this strangeness as something to be resisted in order to assert the apparent clarity of what appears to us, a resistance that would allow an articulation of an instance of clear aesthetic judgment, thereby affirming a sense of subjective certainty, in what follows I seek to abide by its unsettling effect. This unsettling encounter with a work of art, an encounter that provokes a Kierkegaardian trembling and exceeds the scripts in which it becomes legible, opens, in my reading, toward a re-working of contemplation away from judgment and towards what Nietzsche calls �life�.3 Contemplation, in this instance, is offered both as an action and as a capacity, a capacity that is not peculiarly human and that begins to posit the subject as a question for thought. As Derrida suggests in his critique of both Lacan�s and Levinas� production, in keeping with a certain Cartesianism, of a distinction between the human and that which it is not, namely the machine or the animal (what he terms the �animot�), the human, the animal, and the machine are all similarly responsive to the coding of language. It is the claim to subjective certainty that deploys the distinction as part of its conceptual scaffolding.4 Red, through its desire to inhabit the dislocated space of a gift that, in its own narrative, carried a weight akin to the task of post-apartheid reconciliation, offers itself as a peculiar instantiation of this unsettling effect.
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.
Aftershocks: Psychotechnics in the wake of apartheid
(Taylor & Francis, 2016) Truscott, Ross; Smith, Michelle
What we at first found intriguing about Simon Gush�s Red, what the documentary and the installation seemed to mutually conjure, was the Mandela car as a body to be mourned.2 Mourning recurred as a latent theme through the documentary in the interviews with the workers at the Mercedes Benz factory � as Phillip Groom described Mandela�s words on receiving the car, he stressed that its colour �represented the many people that have spilled blood in this country to liberate it, to bring it to liberation�, a notion the workers seemingly anticipated, as at the factory the Mandela car was, as Groom put it, �literally carried�, like a coffin, not simply a �labour of love�, but a work of mourning.3 Attuned to this, the shell of Gush�s reconstruction of the car body installed within the Goethe-Institut gallery in Johannesburg and then outside the Ann Bryant gallery in East London seemed to lie like a cadaver on an autopsy trolley (see image in the editor�s introduction to this issue).
Nationalism and exile in an age of solidarity: Frelimo�ZANU relations in Mozambique (1975�1980)
(Taylor & Francis, 2017) Munguambe, Clinarete Victoria Luis
This article contributes to our knowledge on the intricate relations between host governments and liberation movements and on the workings of transnational military partnerships in the anticolonial struggles of the 1970s, through an examination of the political and military relationship between Mozambique�s Frelimo (host) and Zimbabwe�s ZANU liberation movement. There is a dearth of critical perspectives on the nature of host�liberation movement relations, more so from the point of view of hosts. The article begins to shed light on un-researched Frelimo evaluations of its relationship with ZANU. I utilise the perspectives of Mozambican political elites and non-elites to argue that Frelimo�s support for ZANU was partly motivated by feelings of genuine solidarity. Frelimo�ZANU relations were frosty at first because Frelimo regarded ZANU as an inauthentic liberation movement. ZANU won Frelimo over by demonstrating cogent commitment to armed struggle. However, improved Frelimo�ZANU relations were characterised by disagreements over guerrilla tactics, ZANU guerrillas� objections to Frelimo soldiers� relationships with Zimbabwean women at the warfront, and the unpragmatic approaches of some ZANU elements towards the possibility of a negotiated independence for Zimbabwe. In addition to Frelimo�s backing, ZANU received support from ordinary Mozambican citizens, particularly those who lived in areas along the Rhodesia�Mozambique border. The support of Mozambican citizens for ZANU was encouraged by Frelimo�s revolutionary ideology and by the common ancestry, language and culture of Mozambicans and Zimbabweans living in the border zones. The case of Frelimo and ZANU underlines the point that hosts� influence on liberation movements� internal politics must be seen as limited by the interests and agency of liberation movements themselves. But Frelimo held decisive authority on the right to withdraw support on its territory, which it used as an inducement on ZANU to agree a negotiated independence settlement in 1979.
Memory, oral history and conservation at Robben Island's Bluestone Quarry
(Taylor & Francis, 2017) Lusaka, Mwayi
This article is a critical examination of a conservation project on the restoration of the Stone Wall at Bluestone Quarry on Robben Island, a world heritage site. The project attracted different stakeholders with diverse interests. The Stone Wall was originally built by political prisoners in the early 1960s as part of their hard labour. During the course of the project, issues relating to the authenticity of the Stone Wall arose which pointed to a conflict between cultural heritage and natural heritage on the site. The article focuses on the role of oral history as an approach to conservation and heritage management during the restoration project of the Stone Wall. It thus brings into the spotlight the role of memory-making in the conservation of historical fabric as well as the creation of cultural heritage. The central argument the article seeks to advance is that oral history and memory work helped to identify the appropriate design for the Stone Wall and thus improved the conservation of a significant historical site. Moreover, the memories of the ex-prisoners further enhanced the understanding and appreciation of symbolic meanings of suffering and triumph that the site embodies.
On uncertainty
(University of the Western Cape, Centre for Humanities, 2018) Taylor, Jane
There is some uncertainty written into the form of this paper because, while it seeks to use scholarly procedures in engaging with the philosophical questions provoked by Ludwig Wittgenstein's late speculative essay On Certainty, it arose out of my research toward a theatrical interpretation of that work. The article is an attempt to stage the mode of thought, as well as the state of mind, of this most complex thinker in his last years. My thoughts pay particular attention to philosophical traditions, while considering dramatic forms, spatial meanings, constellations of persons, histories, ideas, events, and designs. Moreover, I am locating the text in the context of the workshop, 'Missing and Missed: The Subject, Politics and Memorialisation of South Africa's Colonial and Apartheid Dead' at which it was presented in early 2018. The workshop generated papers and conversations enquiring into the grief, abjection, rage, and discouragement that have marked so much of the violent histories of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and their legacies of colonialism, genocide, and geographic dislocation. The anguish of these materials requires a certain gravitas, and there might seem some waywardness in my exploring the arcane philosophical thought of a young man born into staggering wealth and privilege in Europe at the end of the nineteenth century. Nonetheless, it seems to me that Wittgenstein made a compelling and genuinely traumatised attempt to use intellectual means to come to terms with the precarious-ness and uncertainty of life in the twentieth century. The depth of his enquiry is read in the following pages alongside some of the details of his 'family romance'.
Debates on memory politics and counter-memory practices in South Africa in the 1990s
(UNISA Press, 2018) Grunebaum, Heidi
Memory politics are often regarded as the �soft� issues contested in the aftermath of political and social upheaval. Yet critical public debates on memory, justice, impunity and reconciliation in South Africa prompted by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) process suggest otherwise. I offer a partial review of some of the key themes and critical debates on justice, reconciliation and memory in the 1990s, followed by a discussion of the spatial practices of the Direct Action Centre for Peace and Memory (DACPM) whose multilayered social pedagogy and activist repertoire of the transitional period challenged the terms of the political transition and the scope of the TRC. The debates on the TRC and the practices of the DACPM constitute but a glimpse into the significance of memory-work for now forgotten terrains of civil activist intervention, contestation and practice.
Understanding refugee durable solutions by international players: Does dialogue form a missing link?
(Taylor and Francis Group, 2018) Bidandi, Fred
This study evaluates durable solutions in relation to refugees from EastAfrica. It particularly focuses on the Great Lakes countries of Rwanda, Burundi,Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda. The study is based on the conviction thatthese four countries have never had peaceful transfer of power which in essence hasbeen a major contributing factor to political violence that has caused forced massmigration in the region to this day. The use of force or military suppression has been anorm since independence of these countries in the early 1960s. This suppression hascontinuously forced many people to fleetheir homes facing abuse of their humanrights, dictatorship, persecution, indiscriminate arrests, ethnic wars and politicalviolence.
Understanding refugee durable solutions by international players: Does dialogue form a missing link?
(Cogent OA, 2018) Bidandi, Fred
This study evaluates durable solutions in relation to refugees from East Africa. It particularly focuses on the Great Lakes countries of Rwanda, Burundi, Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda. The study is based on the conviction that these four countries have never had peaceful transfer of power which in essence has been a major contributing factor to political violence that has caused forced mass migration in the region to this day. The use of force or military suppression has been a norm since independence of these countries in the early 1960s. This suppression has continuously forced many people to flee their homes facing abuse of their human rights, dictatorship, persecution, indiscriminate arrests, ethnic wars and political violence. Based on a survey used to collect data and in-depth interviews with selected refugees from the Great Lakes region living in Cape Town, South Africa, this paper seeks to understand durable solutions through analysing the current refugee situation. It demonstrates that durable solutions can present both challenges and solutions. It also revisits the concept of durable solutions and seeks to re-evaluate whether these various solutions offer a chance for dialogue. With the aid of a legal perspective on the refugee situation in the region, the paper qualifies the concepts of dialogue as a mechanism for peace building as well as driver for voluntary repatriation.

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