Philosophiae Doctor - PhD (History)

Permanent URI for this collection

https://hdl.handle.net/10566/9297

Browse

Now showing 1 - 6 of 6

Digital storytelling and the production of the personal in Lwandle, Cape Town
(University of Western Cape, 2019) Sykes, Pam; Witz, Leslie; Hayes, Patricia
Digital storytelling is a workshop-based practice, originally developed by the Californiabased nonprofit StoryCenter, in which people create short, first-person digital video narratives based on stories from their own lives. The practice has been adopted around the world as a participatory research method, as a pedagogical tool, as a community-based reflective arts practice and as medium for advocacy. It is associated with a loosely connected global movement linked by genealogy and a set of ethical commitments to the significance of all life stories and to the power of listening as a creative and political act.
Frameworks of representation: A design history of the District Six Museum in Cape Town
(University of the Western Cape, 2020) Hayes-Roberts, Hayley Elizabeth; Witz, Leslie
Since 1994, the District Six Museum, in constructing histories of forced removals from District Six, Cape Town, commenced as a post-apartheid memory project which evolved into a memorial museum. Design has been a central strategy claimed by the museum in its process of making memory work visible to its attendant publics evolving into a South African cultural brand. Co-design within the museum is aesthetically infused with sensitively curated exhibitions and a form of museumisation, across two tangible sites of engagement, which imparts a unique visual language. The term design became extraordinarily popular in contemporary Cape Town, where the city was - in 2014 -the World Design Capital. Yet at the same time as design was being inscribed into the public imaginary, it was simultaneously curiously undefined although influential in shifting representational aesthetics in the city. This research seeks to ask questions about this proliferation of interest in design and to examine this through a close reading of the work of the District Six Museum situated near District Six. In particular, micro and macro design elements are explored as socio-cultural practice in re-imagining community in the city that grew out of resistance and cultural networks. Various design strategies or frameworks of representation sought to stabilize and clarify individual and collective pasts enabling and supporting ex-residents to reinterpret space after loss, displacement and separation and re-enter their histories and the city. Post-apartheid museum design modes and methodologies applied by the District Six Museum as museumisation disrupts conventional historiographies in the fields of art, architectural and exhibition design, where the focus is placed on temporal chronologies, in a biographic mode profiling examples of works and designers/artists. Instead, the research contextualises the work of design as making in a more open sense, of exploring the very constructedness of the museum as a space of method, selection, process and representation thereby asking questions about this reified term design as method and practice. The designing ways of the District Six Museum contribute to understanding idioms mediated through design frameworks allowing for a departure from the limited ways design history has been written. Through an unlayering of projects, practices and an examination of archival case studies, exhibition curation, the adaptive reuse of buildings and through institutional rebranding my argument is that the particularities of the claims to design work at the District Six Museum provide a rich case for relating to other contemporaneous processes of making apartheid�s spatial practices visible as projects such as this claim community. Therefore seeking to demystify how this community museum �making� has been fashioned through an investment in various design disciplines, forms and practices revealing the inherent complexity in doing so.
�n Histories-kritiese ondersoek na diei armoede-vraagstuk onder die gekleurde gemeenskap van Kaapstad 1910-1933
(University of Western Cape, 1993) Van der Ventel, Izak Jacobus; De Jongh, P.S
Hierdie verhandeling is die vrug van intensiewe nadenke en navorsing oor die armoedesituasie van gekleurdes van Kaapstad gedurende die jare 1910-1933. Die tydperk is gekies omdat dit besonderlik die teelaarde vir armoede was en vername gebeure soos die Eerste W�reldoorlog (1914-1919), die Groot Griepepidemie (1918). die Groot Droogte (1930) en die Depressies van 1920-1922 en 1930-1932 (Groot Depressie). Dit is egter me't "n historiese aanloop (1652-1909) voorafgegaan om die grondslag van die betrokke mense se voorsate se armoede sowel as di� van hulself deeglik uit te lig en op skrif te stel. Die gekleurde gemeenskap is as onderwerp gekies omdat die meeste gekleurdes in Kaapstad saamgetrek was. Hul regstreekse voorsate, die inheemse Khoi-khoi was reeds van die begin van die wit nedersetting in die omgewing van die Kaap woonagtig. Hulle was in di� vroe� stadium welvarend; gemeet aan destydse standaarde. maar is spoedig tot 'n verarmde. besitlose proletariaat gereduseer. Dit is deur die slinkse handels- en geweldsmetodes van die Europese nedersetters veroorsaak. Dit het die basis van die armoedeerfenis van hul nasate die Kaapse gekleurdes gevorm. Die Khoikhoi het met verloop van tyd 'n metamorfose ondergaan deur ondertrouery met ingevoerde slawe en van die nedersetters. Daaruit is 'n bepaalde groep gebore en ontwikkel wat mettertyd met die benaming "Kaapse gekleurdes" ge�tiketteer sou word.
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.
Teaching humanity: Placing the Cape Town Holocaust Centre in a post-apartheid state
(University of the Western Cape, 2015) Petersen, Tracey; Rassool, Ciraj
This dissertation examines the development of Holocaust education in South Africa, specifically in the period of political transition to democracy and the two decades after apartheid. The history of placing the Holocaust in post-apartheid South Africa shows the dynamics and tensions of identity construction by the state, communities and individuals as the country emerged from a history of violent conflict. Holocaust education was claimed by the newly democratic state as a vehicle of reconciliation. Using archival material, interviews and secondary sources, I examine how a minority community�s project of building a permanent Holocaust centre, came to be considered as part of a national project of reconciliation. I consider the impact of this framing of Holocaust education and the tensions that arose as the Cape Town Holocaust Centre�s founders attempted to define and contain, the place of apartheid in Holocaust memory. Holocaust education shaped the development of post-apartheid identities. It contributed to a collective memory of apartheid by suggesting a particular collective memory of the Holocaust. The Cape Town Holocaust Centre provided the South African Jewish community with a legitimate identity in post-apartheid South Africa and a way to bypass an examination of the implications of having benefited from apartheid. I examine the tensions and contradictions within this construction of the collective memory of the Holocaust and apartheid, and consider the implications for the process of justice, memory and history in South Africa as it emerged from apartheid.
The un/timely death(s) of Chris Hani: discipline, spectrality, and the haunting possibility of return
(University of the Western Cape, 2021) Longford, Samuel; Rassool, Ciraj
This dissertation takes Chris Hani beyond the conventionally biographic by thinking through his multiple lives and deaths and engaging with his legacy in ways that cannot be contained by singular, linear narratives. By doing so, I offer alternative routes through which to understand historical change, political struggle and subjectivity, as well as biographical and historical production as a conflicted and contested terrain. I attend to these conflicting narratives not as a means through which to reconcile the �good� and �bad� sides of history, struggle, or the political subject. Nor to sacrifice either to what Frederick Jameson has referred to as a dialectical impasse: a �conventional opposition, in which one turns out to be more defective than the other�, and through �which only one genuine opposite exists� [therefore sharing] the sorry fate of evil� reduced to mere reflection.�1 Instead I place contested narratives about Hani and the anti-apartheid struggle into conversation with one another, and treat them as �equally integral component[s]�2 of the life and legacy of Hani.

Browse

Browsing by Subject "Apartheid"

Results Per Page

Sort Options