Towards a critical heritage studies

Anna Karlström’s article made me think of the inaugural conference of the International Association of Critical Heritage Studies held in Gothenburg in June 2012. At the conference, heritage scholars and graduate students gathered from around the world—though mainly from Britain, Australia, and Sweden— to discuss key debates in the rapidly developing, wide-ranging field of heritage. The location, the University of Gothenburg, was one of the most prominent sites for the new research field of heritage, as a platform for research and graduate education from about the mid-2000s. The conference was organized through Swedish, British, and Australian international collaboration, with participation by the International Journal of Heritage Studies. The recent careers of two of the main organizers—Laurajane Smith and Rodney Harrison—had seen them circulate between Australia and Britain, and in Smith’s case, to Sweden as well.Web of Scienc

The 1952 Jan van Riebeeck tercentenary festival: constructing and contesting public national history

Paper presented at the Wits History Workshop: Myths, Monuments, Museums; New Premises? 16-18 July, 199

Missing and missed: Rehumanisation, the nation and missing-ness

The bringing together of two lines of research that have previously been treated separately – namely the missing/missed body of apartheid-era atrocities and the racialised body of the colonial museum – animates this issue of Kronos. Both the skeletons of empire and those of apartheid-era atrocities can be thought of as racialised, and as ‘disappeared’ and missing. Furthermore, both areas are marked by similar lines of enquiry, linked to issues of identification, redress and restoration, often framed through notions of humanisation or rehumanisation. Consequently, these different ‘disciplines of the dead’ have been brought into collaboration and contestation with each other, with missingness often reproduced through the ways in which the dead have been drawn into grand narratives of the nation and its seeming triumphs over colonialism and apartheid. Notwithstanding their similarities, the racialised body of the colonial museum and the body of more recent conflicts have their own genealogies and literatures. The ‘disappeared’ entered the political lexicon of terror largely through Argentina and Chile; two decades later Rwanda and Bosnia turned international attention to mass violence and genocide as exemplified by the mass grave. South Africa slips through these grids: apartheid security forces tried but failed to emulate their Latin American counterparts in ‘disappearing’ activists on a large scale, while inter-civilian violence, which mostly took the form of political rather than ethnic, racial or religious cleansing, did not produce mass graves. Nonetheless, both ‘disappearances’ and inter-civilian conflict produced missing persons in the South African conflict – most presumed dead, and thus, as Madeleine Fullard describes them (this issue) ‘in limbo – dead, but missing.’ Investigations into such cases, led first by the country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), and later by its Missing Persons Task Team (MPTT), sought to locate, exhume, identify and return mortal remains to their families. In so doing, South Africa joined a growing list of countries following this route

The politics and aesthetics of commemoration: national days in southern Africa

The contributions to the special section in this issue study recent independence celebrations and other national days in South Africa, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Madagascar and the Democratic Republic of Congo. They explore the role of national days in state-making and nation-building, and examine the performativity of nationalism and the role of performances in national festivities. Placing the case studies in a broader, comparative perspective, the introduction first discusses the role of the state in national celebrations, highlighting three themes: firstly, the political power-play and contested politics of memory involved in the creation of a country’s festive calendar; secondly, the relationship between state control of national days and civic or popular participation or contestation; and thirdly, the complex relationship between regional and ethnic loyalties and national identifications. It then turns to the role of performance and aesthetics in the making of nations in general, and in national celebrations in particular. Finally, we look at the different formats and meanings of national days in the region and address the question whether there is anything specific about national days in southern Africa as compared to other parts of the continent or national celebrations world-wide.Web of Scienc

Biography – A Play? Poetologische Experimente mit einer Gattung ohne Poetik

Im Unterschied zu vielen Genres in der abendländischen Tradition gibt es für biographisches Schreiben keine Gattungspoetiken, nur Prototypen, Vorbilder, und die bis heute dominante Erzählordnung ist die chronologische. Kausal- und Finalnexus eines Lebens werden so in wissenschaftlichen wie literarischen Biographien in der Regel behauptet und miteinander verbunden. Die Aufsätze dieses Bandes stellen im Kontrast dazu Variationsmöglichkeiten biographischer Poetologie vor, historische wie gegenwärtige Experimente, (inter-)mediale Spielformen wie Alternativen der Narration. Einige der Beiträge sind zugleich Werkstattberichte von Biographen, die Auskunft über die Konstruktionsprinzipien ihres Schreibens geben. Der Titel des Bandes bezieht sich auf Max Frischs Theaterstück Biografie: Ein Spiel, das 1967 entstand und 1968 im Schauspielhaus Zürich uraufgeführt wurde, und variiert dessen Ausgangsbedingung, ersetzt den Registrator, der dem Helden Kürmann erlaubt, sein Leben – immer wieder dessen entscheidende Situationen verändernd – neu zu leben, durch den Biographen, der die Vita des Biographierten in allen ihren Handlungsoptionen als ein offenes Experiment zu beschreiben versucht

The individual, auto/biography and history in South Africa

Philosophiae Doctor - PhDThis thesis is a contribution to the field of public history, which the author and others at the University of the Western Cape's History Department have over the last decade pioneered in defining and mapping out in South Africa. Rassool's theories about the relationship between history and biography were developed in relation to the life of the Unity Movement leader, I.B. Tabata.South Afric

Red Mandela: Contests of auto-biography and Auto/biography in South Africa

This article examines the case of the red Mercedes-Benz built in 1990 by workers at the Mercedes-Benz plant in East London and presented to Nelson Mandela as a gift shortly after his release from prison. During the 1990s a biographic order marked by a discourse of heroic leaders was growing in South Africa, where biographic narration and self-narration played a noticeable and, at times, substantial part in political transformation and reconstruction. Nelson Mandela's 'long walk to freedom' became the key trope for South Africa's history, narrated as the triumph of reconciliation. The presentation of the car to Nelson Mandela in 1990 occurred at a time of transition in the life of his auto/biography, from the biography of desire for the absent revolutionary leader to the biography of a statesman and president. This partly explains the ambiguous, double-edged history of the gift, as a labour of love on the part of NUMSA workers and as donation by Mercedes-Benz South Africa (the corporate version of these events emphasised the 'friendship' that was 'sparked' between Nelson Mandela and Mercedes-Benz South Africa). Inspired by the East London autoworkers' commitment to produce the car for Mandela, as well as by the resilience some of them showed during their nine-week strike and sleep-in in the plant soon afterwards, Simon Gush's installation Red has intervened in how those events should be remembered. By choosing to exhibit the disassembled body panels of a replica car alongside reconstructed displays of sleep-in strike beds made of scaffolding, foam, upholstery and car headrests, with imagined uniforms of striking workers, Gush has chosen to appropriate the history of the events of 1990 from the celebratory frames of the Mandela biographic order. The installation turns into an inquiry into the labour process and the events of the strike that was critical of the reconciliatory and celebratory understanding of the gift as a product of a partnership between the workers and management

South Africa : A World in one Country. Moments in International Tourist Encounters with Wildlife, the Primitive and the Modem

Abstract During South Africa's transition to democracy in the early 1990s, tourism came to be seen as the 'passport' to development. In an emerging consensus, the country's tourist Africanness was articulated in a series of connected images—a 'world in one country'— presented through its animal wildlife, primitive 'tribalism' and modem society. While the primitive was set in more comfortable surrounds, South Africa's modernity was packaged in a primitive wrapping. This paper constructs a hypothetical tour of South Africa, visiting each element of the tourist vision, and provides a genealogy of these presented images of the past.Résumé Afrique du Sud : le monde en un pays. Instants de rencontres du touriste international avec le monde sauvage, le primitif et la modernité. — Au cours de la transition démocratique du début des années 1990, le tourisme en est venu à être considéré comme le «passeport» pour le développement. Dans ce consensus naissant, l'Africanité du tourisme sud-africain s'articulait en une composition d'images — « le monde en un pays » — autour de la vie sauvage de ses animaux, de son tribalisme « primitif » et de sa société moderne. Alors que le « primitif» était installé dans un environnement confortable, la modernité sud-africaine était, quant à elle, enveloppée dans un emballage primitif. Cet article compose un itinéraire supposé à travers l'Afrique du Sud, s'arrêtant à chaque élément de la vision touristique, et fournit une généalogie de ces images proposées du passé.Rassool Ciraj, Witz Leslie. South Africa : A World in one Country. Moments in International Tourist Encounters with Wildlife, the Primitive and the Modem. In: Cahiers d'études africaines, vol. 36, n°143, 1996. pp. 335-371