Browsing Research Articles (Centre for Humanities Studies) by Author "Lalu, Premesh"
Now showing items 1-9 of 9
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Lalu, Premesh (CODESRIA, 2007)[more][less]
Abstract: 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 responses to apartheid might hold the key for the realignment of its critical commitments in the post-apartheid present. Rather than merely invoking the Enlightenment traditions of the modern university as sufficient grounds for proclaiming a post-apartheid reorientation, I track the career of notions of academic freedom and university autonomy in the outlines of complicity. I show how the concepts of academic freedom and autonomy obscured a prior contract with the state and how that complicity extended a process of subjection. By deploying the postcolonial strategy of abusing the Enlightenment, the paper outlines the failure of opposing apartheid in the name of academic freedom and autonomy. That failure, I argue, resulted in an inability to investigate the relationship be¬tween the university and the state and blinded the university to its role in the creation of racial subjects. Rather than merely casting the university in terms of the foundational concepts of academic freedom and university autonomy, I suggest that it might be more productive to consider the epistemological and political potential of a renewed reference to the Enlightenment. Apartheid's University, cast as continuity of the Enlightenment legacy, might allow us to rewrite its abject script in the direction of resisting the forms of subjection supported by that process of normalisation. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10566/263 Files in this item: 1
Lalu_ApartheidsUniversity2007.pdf (1.138Mb) -
Lalu, Premesh; Isaacman, Allen; Nygren, Tom (Indiana University Press, 2005)[more][less]
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) -
Lalu, Premesh (Blackwell Publishing, 2000)[more][less]
Abstract: 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) -
Lalu, Premesh (Southern African Literature and Culture Centre, UKZN, 2004)[more][less]
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) -
Lalu, Premesh; Harris, Brent (Southern African Literature and Culture Centre, UKZN, 1996)[more][less]
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 Files in this item: 1
Lalu_Horizons1996.pdf (1.269Mb) -
Lalu, Premesh (University of the Western Cape, 2000)[more][less]
Abstract: 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 young woman called Sara in the period of Dutch rule at the Cape. The paper focuses on the production of evidentiary sources and examines the mediations by which a colonial text on subalterns becomes available to the present URI: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41056412 . Files in this item: 1
LaluSara2000.pdf (1.306Mb) -
Lalu, Premesh (Routledge, 1996)[more][less]
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 Files in this item: 1
Lalu_Staging1996.pdf (730.0Kb) -
Lalu, Premesh (University of KwaZulu-Natal, 2007)[more][less]
Abstract: 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. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10566/259 Files in this item: 1
LaluStampede2007.pdf (103.8Kb) -
Lalu, Premesh (History Department, UWC, 2008)[more][less]
Abstract: 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 capitalism. This hinders the emergence of a history of colonialism and nationalism that theorises and historicises the relations of knowledge and power.In what I am calling a postcolonial critique of apartheid, I make explicit the way the question of knowledge and power was often exchanged for historicist constructions of historical change, especially in relation to the transition from the apartheid to the postapartheid. Tangential to my argument is a reminder of the way the native question in the first half of the twentieth-century produced a disciplinary upheaval in South African knowledge projects by combining the impulses drawn from colonial discourse and nationalist anti-colonial narration. Herein we might encounter the problem of South African radical historiography, and its concomitant constructions of the postapartheid. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10566/257 Files in this item: 1
LaluPostcolonial2008.pdf (1.459Mb)
Now showing items 1-9 of 9