Centre for Humanities Research
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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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Breaking the mold of disciplinary area studies
(Indiana University Press, 2016)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 ... -
The ‘Rough edge of deterritorialisation’: Contemplation
(Taylor & Francis, 2016)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 ... -
Aftershocks: Psychotechnics in the wake of apartheid
(Taylor & Francis, 2016)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 ... -
Empathy’s echo: post-apartheid fellow feeling
(Taylor & Francis, 2016)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 ... -
Anxious urbanity: xenophobia, the native subject and the refugee camp
(Routledge Taylor Francis Group, 2013)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 ... -
Uncontained and the Constraints of Historicism as Method: A reply to Mario Pissarra
(Africa South Art Initiative (ASAI), 2013)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 ... -
Digitisation, history, and the making of a postcolonial archive of Southern African liberation struggles
(Indiana University Press, 2005)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 ... -
Incomplete histories: Steve Biko, the politics of self-writing and the apparatus of reading
(Southern African Literature and Culture Centre, UKZN, 2004)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 ... -
The grammar of domination and the subjection of agency: colonial texts and modes of evidence
(Blackwell Publishing, 2000-12)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 ... -
Journeys from the horizons of history: Text, trial and tales in the construction of narratives of pain
(Southern African Literature and Culture Centre, UKZN, 1996-10)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 ... -
Staging historical argument: History I at the University of the Western Cape
(Routledge, 1996)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 ... -
Apartheid's university: Notes on the renewal of the Enlightenment
(CODESRIA, 2007)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 ... -
The virtual stampede for Africa: Digitisation, postcoloniality and archives of the liberation struggles in Southern Africa
(University of KwaZulu-Natal, 2007)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 ... -
Sara's suicide: History and the representational limit
(University of the Western Cape, 2000)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 ... -
When was South African history ever postcolonial?
(History Department, UWC, 2008)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 ...
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