Now showing items 1-13 of 13

    • Apartheid's university: Notes on the renewal of the Enlightenment 

      Lalu, Premesh (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 ...
    • An archive of the future 

      Lalu, Premesh (José Frantz, 2020)
      The University of the Western Cape (UWC) recently entered into a partnership with photographer Rashid Lombard to house his substantial archival collection, which promises to offer expanded perspectives on the everyday ...
    • Breaking the mold of disciplinary area studies 

      Lalu, Premesh (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 ...
    • Digitisation, history, and the making of a postcolonial archive of Southern African liberation struggles 

      Lalu, Premesh; Isaacman, Allen; Nygren, Tom (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 ...
    • The enchantment of freedom at University of the Western Cape 

      Lalu, Premesh (José Frantz, 2020)
      The history of the modern university is ,first and foremost ,the history of the unfolding of complex problematics of a planetary condition through established scientific and humanistic inquiry. Defined as such, the work ...
    • The grammar of domination and the subjection of agency: colonial texts and modes of evidence 

      Lalu, Premesh (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 ...
    • Incomplete histories: Steve Biko, the politics of self-writing and the apparatus of reading 

      Lalu, Premesh (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 ...
    • Journeys from the horizons of history: Text, trial and tales in the construction of narratives of pain 

      Lalu, Premesh; Harris, Brent (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 ...
    • Little Amal 

      Lalu, Premesh (José Frantz, 2020)
      When South Africa celebrated Heritage Day this year, Boschendal Estate in Franschhoek provided an ideal backdrop for the first steps of Little Amal, a three-metre puppet created by the Handspring Puppet Company from South ...
    • Sara's suicide: History and the representational limit 

      Lalu, Premesh (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 ...
    • Staging historical argument: History I at the University of the Western Cape 

      Lalu, Premesh (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 ...
    • The virtual stampede for Africa: Digitisation, postcoloniality and archives of the liberation struggles in Southern Africa 

      Lalu, Premesh (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 ...
    • When was South African history ever postcolonial? 

      Lalu, Premesh (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 ...