Browsing Research Articles (Centre for Humanities Studies) by Subject "Postcolonialism"

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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

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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

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LaluIncomplete2004.pdf (54.09Kb)

When was South African history ever postcolonial?

Lalu, Premesh (History Department, UWC, 2008)

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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.

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http://hdl.handle.net/10566/257

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LaluPostcolonial2008.pdf (1.459Mb)

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Browsing Research Articles (Centre for Humanities Studies) by Subject "Postcolonialism"

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