From tin trunk to world-wide memory : the making of the Bleek collection

Includes bibliographical references (leaves 107-115).This research sketches the history of the Bleek-L1oyd collection by documenting the cataloguing and archiving of material which has occurred in the years subsequent to the recording of the original manuscripts and certain related material during the closing decades of the nineteenth century. It attempts to track the processes by which material elements (notebooks, manuscripts, printed documents, artefacts, objects and original artworks, correspondence, newspaper clippings, pamphlets, books, photographs, paintings) became consolidated - or separated - as part of the making of what is now known as the Bleek-L1oyd archive. In addition, this research examinesthe various projects of knowledge production and writing which have emanated from the archive in the 80 years since a small part of the notebook texts, edited by Lucy Lloyd, was published in 1911. In particular, I examine ways in which the notebook texts have been deployed in the service of emerging and established academic disciplines including philology, "native studies", folklore and anthropology, archaeology and rock art interpretation. In more recent times, the Bleek collection provides a case study of the archive reconstituted for the new nation, serving not only as a site for the recovery of lost or hidden histories, but also as location for an international, redemptive celebration of indigenous identitie

Urban Atmospherics

In this article, we consider how an atmospheric attunement to place enables new ways of writing place. Specifically, we draw on fieldwork conducted in Johannesburg and reflect on the outcome of a remote, collective writing process pursued during months of lockdown, when our attention was dominated by talk of air and virality. We think about how our fieldwork provided us with an unsettling preview of the atmospheric anxieties to come, of a time when the very idea of the urban harboured an unseen and largely uncalibrated threat. Having developed a digital StoryMap as a way to host our written reflections, we also assess the importance of our cross-disciplinary method, especially when it comes to sensing and responding to these atmospheric circulations in less anxious, more critical terms

Urban archives and Walter Benjamin's The Arcades Project

This is a special issue of Critical African Studies, entitled ‘Urban archives and Walter Benjamin's The Arcades Project’. It is followed by an individual article, authored by Julia Viebach. The special issue, guest edited by Noëleen Murray and Jill Weintroub, emerged through their involvement in the scholarly meeting Secret Affinities, a workshop in critical reading and an interrogation of the city in Africa via Walter Benjamin’s Das Passagen-Werk. The collection of essays presented in this volume is one of the outcomes of the workshop, which took place in Johannesburg in 2017. As Walter Benjamin turned his attention to the Paris of the nineteenth century, and to the space of Naples in the 1920s, to begin gathering lingering traces that would contribute to his ‘other’ history, so workshop participants sought to examine architectures, urbanisms and heritage spaces across the city and beyond. This special issue extends the concerns of the workshop, invoking creative modes of research and innovative and experimental forms of writing to construct alternative forms of archiving the urban and the social. Viebach’s article draws on a four-year study of Rwandan survivors’ meaning-making practices. In the paper, she argues that caretaking is critical to understanding genocide memorials. Every day, voluntary practices of care at the memorials, including the cleaning and preserving of human remains, work both to rebuild the self of the caretaker, and to maintain relationships with those who died. These ‘deathscapes’ are important spaces that fulfil multiple and diverse aims, both personal and political.https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rcaf202021-11-28hj2021Anthropology and Archaeolog