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Digitisation, history, and the making of a postcolonial archive of Southern African liberation struggles

Lalu, Premesh; Isaacman, Allen; Nygren, Tom (Indiana University Press, 2005)

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Abstract:

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.

URI:

http://hdl.handle.net/10566/299

Files in this item: 1

Lalu_Digitization2005.pdf (566.8Kb)

Incomplete histories: Steve Biko, the politics of self-writing and the apparatus of reading

Lalu, Premesh (Southern African Literature and Culture Centre, UKZN, 2004)

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Abstract:

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.

URI:

http://hdl.handle.net/10566/298

Files in this item: 1

LaluIncomplete2004.pdf (54.09Kb)

The grammar of domination and the subjection of agency: colonial texts and modes of evidence

Lalu, Premesh (Blackwell Publishing, 2000)

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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 and protocols through which the event came to be narrated in colonial frames of intelligibility. In proposing a strategy for reading the colo¬nial archive, the paper strategically interrupts the flow from an apartheid historiography to what is commonly referred to as "alternative history." The aim in effecting this interrup¬tion is to call attention to the enabling possibilities of critical history. This is achieved not by way of declaration but rather through a practice whereby the foundational category of evidence is problematized. The paper alludes to the limits of alternative history and its approaches to evidence on the one hand, and the conditions of complicity within which evidence is produced on the other. Whereas alternative history identifies its task as one of re-writing South African history, critical history, it is suggested, offers the opportunity to reconstitute the field of history by addressing the sites of its production and also its prac¬tices. In exploring the production of the colonial record on the killing of Hintsa, the paper seeks to complicate alternative history's slippage in and out of the evidentiary rules estab¬lished by colonial domination even as it constitutes the category of evidence as an object for a politics of history of the present.

URI:

http://www.jstor.org/stable/2678049

Files in this item: 1

Lalu_Grammar2000.pdf (707.6Kb)

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)

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Abstract:

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 the ways our horizons advance, limit, and intersect with a multiplicity of meanings that might not have been foreseen by the text's contemporaries. What are the distances between public encounters with the past on the one hand, and on the other the testimonies heard by the Commission or readings of trauma offered by social scientists and historians? In this paper we wish to offer a tentative response to this question by reflecting on various readings of the trial of Andrew Zondo and the public testimony of Lephina Zondo at the TRC. We are interested in the ways in which truths, and histories, are produced "by virtue of multiple forms of constraint".

URI:

http://currentwriting.ukzn.ac.za

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Lalu_Horizons1996.pdf (1.269Mb)

Staging historical argument: History I at the University of the Western Cape

Lalu, Premesh (Routledge, 1996)

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Abstract:

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.

URI:

http://hdl.handle.net/10566/264

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Lalu_Staging1996.pdf (730.0Kb)

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