Research Articles (Centre for Humanities Research)

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    Looking back
    (Jos� Frantz, 2020) Odendaal, Andr�
    Professors Patricia Hayes and Premesh Lalu have in this edition of Signals provided useful insight into the importance of theory, history, archives and the humanities in South Africa, and how they can help �assist us in building an ongoing capacity to resist oppression and develop a politics of care in the present and future�. Their reflections on how to develop new ideas for the way forward in a country and �post-truth� world mired in crisis invite us to look back for lessons to the 1980s and 1990s when UWC famously started redefining itself as an �intellectual home of the democratic left�, challenging the traditional roles played by universities in South Africa. UWC questioned the whole system of knowledge production in South Africa and changed its mission to serve primarily excluded and marginalised narratives, seeking in the process to develop �an open and critical alignment � with the political movements and organisations committed to the struggle for liberation�.
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    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.