Uncontained and the Constraints of Historicism as Method: A reply to Mario Pissarra

Mario Pissarra’s rigorous and considered critical review of Uncontained: Opening the Community Arts Project archive (2012) marks a significant contribution to starting a discussion that the book and exhibition aimed to provoke. That an interlocutor of his authority has undertaken such an attentive and thoughtful critique does the publication a great service and opens up pathways for further conversation and work on the Community Arts Project (CAP) art collection at the University of the Western Cape (UWC). I would like to reciprocate in a similar vein and take up Third Text Africa’s invitation to respond to Pissarra’s review by thinking about the merits and limits of his critique.Department of HE and Training approved lis

Environmental Vulnerability and Social Unrest: A Comparative Index

A body of literature has identified links between existing social and environmental conditions and the likelihood of civil unrest due to future climate-driven events. Recent episodes of social unrest including, but not limited to the Arab Spring, the Syrian Civil War, increased terrorism and the Darfur conflict can be linked to previously existing environmental vulnerabilities. The literature identifies individual factors associated with climate-driven vulnerability for future social unrest, but no comprehensive index exists. An index of environmental vulnerability to climate-driven impacts as a possible predictor for hot-spots for future social unrest was created using previously identified variables via a review and analysis of prior journal articles and relevant international indices. A vulnerability assessment framework to climate-driven social unrest was developed to identify countries that appear highly vulnerable to such outbreaks based on chosen factors. Selected variables are complimented with the inclusion of national-level indicators that are selected from global indices for which data has previously been compiled. This index is a comparative tool to identify patters and opportunities for mitigation on the national level

Tracing memory : representation and the Auschwitz experience in Charlotte Delbo's Auschwitz et après

This study aims to examine the ways in which memory is represented in Auschwitz survivor, Charlotte Delbo's literary trilogy, Auschwitz et Apres, (Auschwitz and After) (1970a;1970b;1971). Its examination of memory is premised on the understanding of survivor narrative as testimonial narrative and testimony as the telling of the memory of historical events which strain or exceed conventional frameworks of representation. As such, the aim of this study is to demonstrate the way that representations of memory of a limit-experience problematise the certainty of its own testimonial transmission. By attempting to theorise the dynamics of narrating personal memory and then by analysing key extracts in each volume of the trilogy, this examination attempts to demonstrate how the event of the Holocaust, the difficulty of being a survivor and an unwilling reception of the survivor's story are collectively implicated in the way that memory contests its own representation. By examining the discontinuities of memory, this study intends to show how, in very different ways, the silences and ruptures of memory which are produced in these readings are a remembering of a different form. Bibliography: pages 138-150

The construction and evaluation of four series of lessons to stimulate the flow of ideas in the creative writing of fourth, fifth, and sixth grade pupils.

Thesis (Ed.M.)--Boston Universit

Zwischen Nakba, Shoah und Apartheid: Nachdenken über Komplizität und Erinnern

Die Autorin setzt sich mit persönlicher Verstrickung in drei grundlegende Katastrophen des 20. Jahrhunderts auseinander, die zwar klar voneinander zu trennen sind, dennoch aber miteinander in Beziehung stehen. Diese Wechselbeziehungen zeigt die Autorin beispielhaft an entscheidenden Episoden ihrer eigenen Lebensgeschichte sowie der Erfahrungen ihrer Familie auf. Ihre jüdisch-südafrikanische Herkunft ist Anstoß, den Überresten eines palästinensischen Dorfes nachzugehen, das heute unter dem "Südafrikanischen Wald" in Israel begraben liegt, für den sie als Kind einmal Geld gesammelt hat; dieser familiäre Zusammenhang führt sie ferner in die oberhessische Kleinstadt, aus der ihrer Großmutter gerade noch die Flucht vor dem Terror der Nationalsozialisten gelungen ist; und sie ist schließlich der leeren Fläche in Kapstadt konfrontiert, wo sich einmal das lebensvolle Viertel District Six befand, in unmittelbarer Nachbarschaft ihres Wohnviertels. Die früheren Einwohner*innen wurden vom Apartheidsregime deportiert. Allen drei Orten ist gemeinsam, dass das, was ihnen hier Bedeutung gibt, durch Gewalt und Verwaltungshandeln ausgelöscht wurde. Durch die Darstellung ihrer eigenen Erfahrung, zu der auch die Arbeit an einem Film über die drei Orte gehört, zeigt die Autorin Möglichkeiten auf, mnemonische Spuren auf persönlicher Ebene und darüber hinaus aufzufinden. Zugleich verweist sie auf die Verstrickung in Komplizität durch die hier angesprochenen Prozesse, mit der sich jegliche ernsthafte Auseinandersetzung konfrontiert sieht. Diese Positionierung steht im Gegensatz zu vereinfachenden und destruktiven Reaktionen auf die Problematik von Komplizität und Komplexität, von Ethnonationalismus und Identitätspolitik.This paper addresses personal implication into three fundamental catastrophes of the 20th century. While these are disjunctive, they are nevertheless interconnected. Such interconnection is demonstrated and exemplified here by germane episodes of the author’s own life and family experience. Her Jewish South African background lets her probe into the remnants of a Palestinian village buried beneath a "South African" Forest in Israel, for which she once raised money as a child; brings her to the small town in Upper Hesse whence her grandmother made a narrow escape to South Africa from Nazi terror; and confronts her with the blank space of what once was Cape Town's sprawling District Six which lies in the vicinity of where she lives and from where the inhabitants were deported by the Apartheid regime. All three spaces have in common that what makes them important in this reflection has been obliterated by force and political fiat. In recounting her own experience, including the making of a film on the three contexts, the author traces ways to retrieve mnemonic traces, on a personal level and beyond. At the same time, she demonstrates entanglements of complicity in the processes addressed that any serious treatment has to confront. Such engagement is set against the simplistic and destructive answers to complicity and complexity, ethno-nationalism and identity politics

Debates on memory politics and counter-memory practices in South Africa in the 1990s

Memory politics are often regarded as the “soft” issues contested in the aftermath of political and social upheaval. Yet critical public debates on memory, justice, impunity and reconciliation in South Africa prompted by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) process suggest otherwise. I offer a partial review of some of the key themes and critical debates on justice, reconciliation and memory in the 1990s, followed by a discussion of the spatial practices of the Direct Action Centre for Peace and Memory (DACPM) whose multilayered social pedagogy and activist repertoire of the transitional period challenged the terms of the political transition and the scope of the TRC. The debates on the TRC and the practices of the DACPM constitute but a glimpse into the significance of memory-work for now forgotten terrains of civil activist intervention, contestation and practice

Spectres of the untold: memory and history in South Africa after the truth and reconciliation commission

Philosophiae Doctor - PhDThis work is a meditation on the shaping of time and its impact on living with and understanding atrocity in South Africa in the wake of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC)