Chr 2013 annual report for web

Centre for Humanities Research University of the Western Cape

Cecil Skotnes, from The Assassination of Shaka, a portfolio of 43 prints, with captions by poet Stephen Gray, 1973. Woodcut on paper, 44.54 x 27.9 cm. UWC Art Collection

Annual Report 2013

Centre for Humanities Research University of the Western Cape

Annual Report 2013

Compiled by Premesh Lalu

Design: Emile Maurice & Mark van Niekerk, CHR

Centre for Humanities Research, University of the Western Cape Private bag x17, Bellville, 7535 Tel: +2721 959 3162 Fax: +2721 959 1282 llalkhen@uwc.ac.za

Contents

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Introduction Highlights Publications Chapters in books Edited volumes Forthcoming publications Conference presentations, lectures and seminars [Full‐time faculty] Colloquia Newspaper opinion pieces and public appearances Film Seminar programme Committee service

22 Appendix A: Report on the Special Ministerial Committee’s Catalytic Project, “Hidden Voices in Art and Music”, by Heidi Grunebaum and Premesh Lalu

38 Appendix B: Report on the Third Annual Winter School by Siân Butcher

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Second stage of the Special Ministerial Committee’s Catalytic Project, “Hidden Voices in Art and Music”: December 2013 – June 2014

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Introduction

The Centre for Humanities Research (CHR) of the University of the Western Cape (UWC) is widely viewed as a major contributor to the ongoing national debates on the humanities and social sciences in South Africa. Several examples attest to this. The ongoing publication of opinion pieces and commentaries by Professor Suren Pillay in local and international newspapers, coupled with several keynotes at universities in South Africa, Argentina, Switzerland, USA and India, and an invitation for the Director of the CHR, Professor Premesh Lalu, to serve on the board of the International Consortium of Humanities Centres and Institutes continues to draw attention to the CHR’s formulation of a reconstituted study of the humanities. The steady flow of publications in accredited national and international journals has also contributed substantially to the standing of the CHR. This year alone, extraordinary Professors Allen Isaacman and Brian Raftopolous have both published books accredited to the CHR on questions relating to Southern African studies. Dr Heidi Grunebaum’s widely acclaimed film, The Village Under the Forest, was viewed widely, extensively debated through the media and overwhelmingly acknowledged with an award for the best South African documentary at the 2013 Encounters South African International Documentary Festival in Cape Town.

Our international partnerships continue to flourish and expand with many universities in South Africa and abroad seeking research collaborations with the CHR. Amongst these, the opportunity afforded to Premesh Lalu to address the Consortium for Humanities Centres and Institutes (CHCI) in the USA in 2013 was an opportunity to place our research questions before an international body of humanities centres and institute directors. The meeting was a resounding success, and there was much interest amongst scholars to work closely with the CHR. In 2014 the CHCI will convene its second annual executive meeting in Cape Town, with the view to possibly holding its 2016 annual conference in South Africa.

Highlights

The most significant recognition of the research of the CHR came in the form of a R6 000 000 grant (Andrew W Mellon Foundation) to support work in the area of Aesthetics and Politics. The grant will support various creative initiatives in the CHR, including the African Programme in Museum and Heritage Studies, Visual Studies, and Film Studies. It will also help to strengthen work in the area of the Community Arts Project (CAP) Archive, and enable building relations with the Handspring Puppet Company and various community museum projects. A substantial part of the grant will be dedicated to supporting post‐graduate research and fellowships in keeping with our primary commitment to post‐graduate studies in the humanities and social sciences.

The annual Winter School, now in its third year, also represents a major achievement of the CHR. In 2013 the Winter School hosted 57 graduate students and faculty members over seventeen days. The five‐day retreat in Paarl consisted of graduate presentations and focused writing sessions. The Winter School also afforded us the opportunity to host leading international scholars, such as Professors John Mowitt, Sanil V, Arunima Gopinath, Qadri Ismail and Naomi Scheman, amongst others, in an extended conversation on graduate research that proved to be an invaluable exercise [See Appendix B: Report on the Third Annual Winter School by Siân Butcher].

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Similarly, the award of R1 000 000 to host three artists in residence in the CHR has helped to foster relationships with public projects such as Handspring Puppet Company, Iziko Museums of Cape Town, and Robben Island Museum. Our three resident artists, Neo Muyanga, Mongi Mthombeni and Emile Maurice, have made steady progress on their respective projects [Appendix A: Report on the Special Ministerial Committee’s Catalytic Project, “Hidden Voices in Art and Music” by Heidi Grunebaum and Premesh Lalu]

The weekly seminars and reading groups provide forums for lively academic exchange.

This year the CHR seminar series and visiting scholars programme featured prominent international scholars, such as Partha Chatterjee (Anthropology, Columbia University), David Scott (Anthropology, Columbia University), G Arunima (Women’s Studies, Jawarharlal Nehru University), Naomi Scheman (Philosophy, University of Minnesota), Marissa Moorman (History, Indiana University), Rob Gordon (Anthropology, Middlebury College, USA), Dag Henrichsen (Basler Afrika Bibliographien, Switzerland) and Richa Nagar (Women’s Studies, University of Minnesota). Paige Sweet, Diane Detournay, Geraldine Frieslaar, Bianca van Laun and Anna Selmeczi received various invitations to present their research at the University of South Africa, Edinburgh University, University of Fort Hare and the University of the Orange Free State, amongst others. We would like to take the opportunity to congratulate former postdoctoral fellows Phindi Mnyaka and Christian Williams on their respective appointments to the Department of Art History at Rhodes University and the History Department at the University of the Free State. We are also pleased to report that Ruchi Chaturvedi was appointed to the Sociology Department at UCT, while Jung Ran Annachiara Forte was appointed to a three‐year contract in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at UWC. Ayanda Nombila, a MA candidate in History and regular contributor to CHR reading groups and seminars, received an offer to undertake his doctoral studies at the Makerere Institute of Social Development under the supervision of Professor Mahmood Mamdani. Finally, we are pleased to report that Lannie Birch (English) and Steve Akoth (Anthropology) were awarded doctoral degrees at UWC’s September 2013 graduation ceremony.

Left: Some of the 57 graduates and faculty members who attended the 2013 CHR Winter School, Laborie, Paarl, 2013. Photograph: Premesh Lalu Right: Left to right: Gary Minkley, Helena Pohlandt‐McCormick, Premesh Lalu and Duncan Brown, CHR Winter School, Laborie, Paarl, 2013. Photograph: Aidan Erasmus

Ongoing faculty participation ensured the continuity of the academic programme and research agenda of the CHR. For it to function optimally, the CHR built a support base

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amongst members of a range of academic departments across the Faculty of Arts in 2013 on the theme of the Postcolonial Critique of Apartheid. We have deepened already productive exchanges with colleagues in the Afrikaans and English Departments, as well as in Anthropology, History, Women and Gender Studies and the Department of Geography.

In 2013 the CHR aligned its research on Aesthetics and Politics, and Law and Society, to broader questions of the postcolonial critique of apartheid. Guided by regular weekly study circles organised under the auspices of the Programme on the Study of the Humanities in Africa, the 2013 cohort of fellows and researchers attended to conceptual debates on decolonisation and the problematisation of race, nationalism and the post‐ apartheid as these impinge on the study of the humanities in Africa. A central concern of our reading groups related to how the humanities might be rethought when passed through the grids of postcolonial criticism, and how the concept of the post‐apartheid might be inflected differently when placed in a larger framework of the critiques of racial formation. The question of the university as an institutional site of apartheid’s making continues to animate this line of inquiry and research.

In 2013 we hosted eleven postdoctoral fellows, five doctoral fellows and one MA fellow.

We also welcomed seven postdoctoral fellows on the African Humanities Programme, funded through the American Council for Learned Societies during the course of 2013.

The postdoctoral fellows included Drs Paige Sweet (English), Diane Detournay (English), Carlos Fernandes (Sociology), Ross Trusscott (Psychology), Ruchi Chaturvedi (Anthropology), Maurits van Bever Donker (English), Phindi Mnyaka (Visual History), Giorgio Miescher (History), Lorena Rizzo (Visual History), Giacomo Loperfido (Anthropology) and Anna Selmeczi (Political Studies). The doctoral fellows were Tinashe Mawere (Women’s and Gender Studies), Geraldine Frieslaar (History), Tyrone August (English), Bianca van Laun (History) and Nicole Ridgway (History). Three University of Fort Hare doctoral candidates funded through the SARChI Chair in Social Change, Michelle Smith, Therona Moodley and Negar Taymoorzadeh, were given affiliate status in the CHR. At MA level, we invited Niv Bachu (Politics) to join the CHR fellowship group.

Professor Helena Pohlandt‐McCormick (ICGC‐CHR Research Chair) and Professor Brian Raftopolous (Senior Mellon Research Mentor) were indispensable in lending their expertise and knowledge to the reading groups and seminars. With the support of the Catalytic Project on “Hidden Voices in Art and Music”, funded through the Charter for the Humanities and Social Sciences, Neo Muyanga, Emile Maurice and Mongi Mthombeni were appointed as artists in residence [See appendix A]. The CHR awarded writing fellowships to Professor Steward Van Wyk (Afrikaans), Kurt Campbell (History) and Therona Moodley (English) for three months at the ICGC, University of Minnesota.

The CHR also welcomed Pastory Magayane Bushozi (Tanzania), Nathan Osita Ezeliora (Nigeria), Ogaga Doherty Abraham Okuyade (Nigeria), Robert Ojambo (Uganda), De Valera Botchway (Ghana), Florence Ebila (Uganda), Angelus Kakande (Uganda) and Emmanuel Umezinwa (Nigeria) as fellows of the African Humanities Programme of the American Council for Learned Societies.

The CHR acknowledges the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Marie Currie fellowship programme, American Council for Learned Societies, and the Department of Arts and Culture Dulcie September Legacy Project, the Interdisciplinary Centre for the Study of Global Change, University of Minnesota, and the SARChI Chair in Social Change

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at the University of Fort Hare for grants supporting our postdoctoral, doctoral and masters fellowship programmes. We also acknowledge the visit by Medico International who have agreed to support the work of the CHR with artists in Masipumulele through a grant of 10 000 Euros.

Top left: David Scott lecturing on The Dialogue of Identity, 6 Spin Street, Cape Town.

Photograph: Suren Pilley Top right: Part of the audience at David Scott’s lecture on The Dialogue of Identity, 6 Spin Street, Cape Town. Photograph: Lameez Lalkhen Bottom left: Left to right: De Valera Botchway, Florence Ebila, Angelus Kakande and Emmanuel Umezinwa, all postdoctoral fellows of the African Humanities Programme, funded by the American Council for Learned Societies, UWC campus, 2013. Photograph courtesy of the CHR Bottom Right: Part of the audience at the first of five David Scott lectures titled ‘Stuart Hall’s Voice’, CHR, November 2013. Photograph: Lameez Lalkhen

We are proud to report on the many significant achievements of fellows associated with the Centre for Humanities Research. This builds on the substantial achievements of 2012. The many commendations and awards received by fellows and faculty associated with the CHR bears testimony to the quality of the research produced through the CHR. Premesh Lalu and Noëleen Murray received the Vice Chancellor’s award for outstanding edited volume for Becoming UWC: Reflections, Pathways and the Unmaking of Apartheid’s Legacy (CHR, 2012). Heidi Grunebaum and Emile Maurice received the Arts Faculty Research Incentive award in the category of best creative work for their book

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accompanying the exhibition, Uncontained: Opening the Community Arts Archive (CHR, 2012), while Giorgio Miescher received the award for the best monograph for Namibia’s Red Line: A history of a veterinary and settlement border (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

The Arts Faculty Research Incentive award for best first publication went to Maurits van Bever Donker for “Ethical injunctions: The University of the Western Cape in the space of the here and now”, published in Social Dynamics in 2012.

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The book, Uncontained: Opening the Community Arts Archive, on display at Iziko South African National Gallery during the exhibition of the same title, 18 August 2012 – 12 April 2013. The book, which features contributions by 31 authors from universities, cultural organisations and NGOs celebrates printmaking at the now defunct Community Arts Project (CAP). For their work as editors of the book, Heidi Grunebaum and Emile Maurice received the 2013 UWC Arts Faculty Research Incentive award in the category of best creative work. Photograph: Mark van Niekerk

Part of the cover of Becoming UWC, edited by Premesh Lalu and Noëleen Murray, and published by the CHR in 2012. Lalu and Murray received the UWC Vice‐Chancellor’s award for outstanding edited volume.

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Rector and Vice‐Chancellor of UWC, Brian O’Connell, speaking at the opening of the exhibition, ‘Uncontained: Opening the Community Arts Project Archive’, Art.b Gallery, Bellville, 8 May 2012.

Curated by Emile Maurice for the CHR, the exhibition was also held at Iziko South African National Gallery in 2012/2013, where it was also favourably received. Photograph: Tiaan van Deventer

Installation photograph of the exhibition, ‘Uncontained: Opening the Community Arts Archive’, Iziko South African National Gallery, 18 August 2012 – 12 April 2013. Photograph: Mark van Niekerk

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Top left: Sophie Peters, Mafia and the earoplane (sic), 1994. Linocut, 29.6 x 19.3 cm Top Right: Sophie Peters, Mafia and Madala, 1994. Linocut, 29.7 x 19.4 cm Bottom left: Sophie Peters, Mafia by the fire, 1994. Linocut, 29.6 x 19.5 cm Bottom right: Sophie Peters, Mafia Dance in Celebration, 1994. Linocut, 30.3 x 20.7 cm All of the above works are from the Community Arts Project Archive, managed by the CHR.

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Publications

Fernandes, Carlos. ”Intelectuais orgânicos e legitimação do Estado no Moçambique pós‐ independente: o caso do Centro de Estudos Africanos (1975‐1985).” Revista AFRO‐ÁSIA 48. July (2013): 11‐44.

Grunebaum, Heidi. “‘Uncontained’ and the constraints of historicism as method: A reply to Mario Pissarra.” Third Text Africa 3.1. (2013): 86‐92.

Isaacman, Allen and Barbara Isaacman. Dams, Displacement and the Delusion of Development: Cahora Bassa and Its Legacies in Mozambique, 1965 – 2007. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2013.

[Extraordinary Professor]

Lalu, Premesh. “Nelson Mandela is Very Much With Us.” Economic and Political Weekly 28. XLVIII. (Delhi: 2013).

Miescher, Giorgio. Die Rote Linie. Die Geschichte der Veterinär ‐ und Siedlungsgrenze in Namibia (1890er‐1960er Jahre). Basel: Basler Afrika Bibliographien, 2013.

Pillay, Suren. “Anxious Urbanity: Xenophobia, the Native Subject and the Refugee Camp.” Social Dynamics 39.1. (2013): 75‐91.

Pillay, Suren. “Marikana and the Politics of Law and Order.” Codesria Bulletin 3&4.

(2013).

Pillay, Suren. “Critique and the Decolonising Nation.” Makerere Institute for Social Research Working Paper 11. (2013).

Pillay, Suren. “The Marikana Massacre: South Africa’s Post‐Apartheid Dissensus.” Economic and Political Weekly 48, 50 (Delhi: 2013) Raftopoulos, Brian. “The 2013 Elections in Zimbabwe: The End of an Era.” Journal of Southern African Studies 39. 4. (2013): 971‐988.

Rizzo, Lorena. “Visual Aperture: Bureaucratic System of Identification, Photography, and Personhood in Colonial South Africa.” History of Photography 37.3. (2013): 263‐282.

Rizzo, Lorena. “Shades of Empire: Police Photography in German South‐West Africa.”

Visual Anthropology 26:4 (2013): 328‐354.

Sylvanus, Nina. “Chinese Devils, the Global Market and the Declining Power of Togo’s Nana‐Benzes.” African Studies Review 56.1. (2013): 65‐80.

[Postdoctoral fellow, 2012]

Truscott, Ross. “Obsessional whiteness and the unpaid debt of apartheid.”

Psychology and Personality Compass 7.8. (2013): 537‐546.

Truscott, Ross and Hook, Derek. “Fanonian ambivalence: Of psychoanalysis and postcolonialism.” Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology. 33.3. (2013).

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Chapters in books Raftopoulos, Brian. “Introduction.” The Hard Road to Reform. Ed. Brian Raftopoulos.

Harare: Weaver Press, 2013.

Raftopoulous, Brian. “An Overview of the GPA: National Conflict, Regional Agony and International Dilemma.” The Hard Road to Reform.

Ed. Brian Raftopoulos. Harare: Weaver Press, 2013.

Ridgway, Nicole. “In Excess of the Already Constituted: Interaction as Performance.” Memory and Meaning: Digital Differences. Ed. Tim Fawns.

Oxford: Rodopi, 2013. 115‐129.

Sylvanus, Nina. “Fashionability in Colonial and Postcolonial Togo.” African Dress: Fashion, Agency, Performance. Eds. Karen Hansen and Soyini Madison. Oxford: Berg, 2013.

[Postdoctoral fellow, 2012]

A copy of The Hard Road to Reform, edited by Brian Raftopoulos, on display at the CHR, 2013. Photograph courtesy of the CHR

Truscott, Ross. “Introjection.” Encyclopaedia of Critical Psychology. Ed. Thomas Teo. Berlin: SpringerVerlag, 2013.

Edited volumes

Eds. Raftopoulos, Brian, David Moore & Norma Kriger. Progress’ in Zimbabwe: The Past and Present of a Concept and a Country. Routledge, London, 2013.

Forthcoming publications

Detournay, Diane. “The Civilizational Contours of ‘Woman:’ Racial Difference and the Argument for Women’s Rights.” [Submitted for publication to Cultural Critique.

Currently under review].

Fernandes, Carlos. “The Politics of history writing and state legitimization in postcolonial Mozambique: The case of the Centre for African Studies, History Workshop (1980‐ 1986).” Kronos [Forthcoming, November 2013].

Eds. Forte, Jung Ran Annachiara, Israel, Paolo and Witz, Leslie. Out of History (Cape Town: HSRC Press) [Forthcoming 2014].

Grunebaum, Heidi. “Complicity and the search for an ethical response.” Eds. Clint de Bruyn and Marthie Momberg. Pedagogical liberation: Reshaping public perceptions of Palestine‐Israel [Forthcoming 2014].

Mnyaka, Phindezwa. “From Salons to the Native Reserve: reformulating the 'native question' through pictorial photography.” Social Dynamics [Special issue forthcoming 2014].

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Hoffman, Anette and Mnyaka, Phindezwa. “Hearing Voices in the Archive.” [Under review with Social Dynamics for a special issue in 2014].

Mnyaka, Phindezwa. Book Review on Early Modern Dutch Prints of Africa by Sutton, A. 2012. Sixteenth Century Journal [Forthcoming in 2014].

Sweet, Paige. “Gardens, Authorship, and an Ethics of the Un‐owned: A Reading of Leslie Marmon Silko’s Gardens in the Dunes.” [Under review with Contemporary Literature].

Sweet, Paige. “Plagiarising History? Technologies of Inscription and Zakes Mda’s The Heart of Redness.” [Finalising to submit to Publications of the Modern Language Association of America].

Truscott, Ross & Hook, Derek. “Lessons from the postcolony: Frantz Fanon, psychoanalysis and a critical psychology of the postcolonial.” Eds. C. Kinnvall & P. W. Nesbitt‐Larking. Global Political Psychology. London: Palgrave [Forthcoming].

Truscott, Ross. “Die Antwoord is being beaten: Zef, memory, and post‐apartheid melancholia.” Ed. M. O’ Loughlin. The Ethics of Remembering and the Consequences of Forgetting: Essays on Trauma, History and Memory. Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield [Due December 2013].

Truscott, Ross & Hook, Derek. “Psychoanalysis in the time of apartheid.” Eds. D. Pick & M. Ffytche. Psychoanalysis in the Age of Totalitarianism. London: Routledge [Due December 2013].

van Bever Donker, Maurits. “On the limit of community: coming to terms with apartheid’s grounds.” [Submitted for publication to Research in African Literatures. Currently under review].

Eds. van Bever Donker, Maurits, Truscott, Ross and Minkley, Gary. The Remains of the Social. [Proposal and sample chapters for edited collection approved by Human Sciences Research Council Press].

Conference presentations, lectures and seminars [Full‐time faculty]

Premesh Lalu, “The Absent Center: Homo Oeconomicus, Nationalism and the Humanities after Apartheid.” Annual Conference of the Consortium of Humanities Centres and Institutes on ‘Humanities, Publics and the State’, Hall Institute for the Humanities, USA. The paper was also read in the Distinguished Lecture Series hosted by the Interdisciplinary Centre for the Study of Global Change at the University of Minnesota, at the University of South Africa Research Week, and as a seminar paper in the South African Contemporary History and Humanities Seminar, University of the Western Cape.

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Premesh Lalu, “Empire and Nation”, keynote address to the South African Empire Conference, hosted by the Centre for African Studies at the University of Basel, September 2013.

Premesh Lalu, “The humanities after apartheid”, Universidad Nasional de San Martin, Buenos Aires, Argentina, October 2013.

Suren Pillay, “Subaltern Urbanism?” Mumbai Workshop on Subaltern Urbanism organised by the Center for Social Difference, Columbia University, in Mumbai, India, January 2013.

Suren Pillay, Respondent: The Desmond Tutu Public Lecture by Archbishop KG Hammar.

(Centre for Theology & Religious Studies, Lund University), 27 Feb 2013.

Suren Pillay “The Dilemmas of Transitional Justice”, one of three keynote presentations at The Fifth International Conference on the Great Lakes Region, Kigali, Rwanda, 21 March 2013.

Suren Pillay, “Decolonising the Humanities”, Africa, Reading, Humanities Project seminar, University of Cape Town, Dept. of English, April 2013.

Suren Pillay, with Sampie Terreblanche and Ben Turok, in a public dialogue on ‘Lost in Transformation’, Centre for Conflict Resolution, Center for the Book, 10 September 2013.

Suren Pillay, “The Inequality of Inequality, A Conceptual Questioning”. Presentation to the inaugural UNISA College of Humanities and Social Sciences Summer School, October 2013.

Suren Pillay, “Criminal and Political Justice and the Politics of Reconciliation, A view from South Africa”, International Workshop on Justice and Reconciliation, Zimbabwe Institute, Gweru, Zimbabwe, 21 November 2013.

Heidi Grunebaum, “'Do you see ... behind that strong pine tree?' Looking for the ruins of Lubya at South Africa Forest in Palestine/Israel”, paper read at the American Comparative Literature Association’s Annual Congress, University of Toronto, 5 ‐7 April 2013.

Heidi Grunebaum, “Memory, landscape and ethical remappings: viewing Village Under the Forest” at SARChI ‘Social Acts’ Seminar, University of Fort Hare, East London, 25 July 2013.

Heidi Grunebaum with Hayley Galgut and Adam Mazo, “Building Bridges: Reconciliation in past, present and future.” Panel discussion on Rwanda, South Africa and Palestine/Israel. Limmud Annual Conference, Protea Technopark, Stellenbosch, 3 August 2013.

Heidi Grunebaum, keynote address at the opening of “Voices of the Youth” exhibition, Iziko SANG Annexe, 9 March 2013.

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Heidi Grunebaum, Respondent for Tanya Petrovic and Michel Doortmont at the “Identity, Nationalism, and the Everyday” conference, UWC, 24 January 2013.

Top and bottom: Graduates and faculty members at the CHR’s Winter School, Laborie, Paarl, 2013.

Photographs: Premesh Lalu

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Left to right: Suren Pillay, Ben Turok and Sampie Terreblanche at the Centre for Conflict Resolution public dialogue on Terreblanche’s book, Lost in Translation, Centre for the Book, Cape Town, 10 September 2013. Photograph: Fanie Jason, courtesy of the Centre for Conflict Resolution

Premesh Lalu delivering the keynote address to the South African Empire Conference, University of Basel, Switzerland, September 2013. Photograph: Melanie Boehi

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Colloquia

The central theme of the 2013 PSHA annual colloquium, which was held in Simonstown, was “Reading the Contours of the Humanities in Africa”. It provided a forum in which postdoctoral fellows and doctoral candidates in the PSHA and its affiliated research platforms were able to present central questions that had emerged in the course of their research. The Phindi Mnyaka, Carlos Fernandes and Ayanda Nombila at the colloquium was a scene of CHR’s Annual PSHA Colloquium, Reading the Contours of the lively discussion and debate Humanities in Africa, Simonstown, November 2013. around questions as diverse Photograph: Suren Pillay as “Authors and Afterlives”, “The Diseased Native”, “African Modernity and Nationalism, the “Displaced Dreams of Psychoanalysis”, and “The Principle of Insufficiency”. Supplemented by the timely involvement of Professor David Scott, the colloquium helped in shaping arguments, drawing out connections, and situating research projects on the forefront of research in their fields.

Profs. Wendy Woodward (English) and Shirley Brooks (Geography) hosted the third Animal Studies Round Table in Africa Colloquium on 3 and 4 September 2013 through the CHR. The Colloquium focused on the representations of nonhuman animals in Africa A selection of articles by CHR faculty members published in with the intention of various newspapers opening up debates across the disciplines. Some questions that framed discussions were: Are we really transforming our home disciplines in our research on the nonhuman? Or are we merely adding another element to a humanist agenda in the Arts? What does the “Animal Turn”

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in the Humanities signify? What research has this inspired? Papers on Animal Studies in African Universities, Iconic Animals, Companion Animals in an African Context, Hybridities and Animal beauty were invited.

Newspaper opinion pieces and public appearances

Suren Pillay

“Incomplete Rituals: Still a Song to Sing.” Cape Times. 20 December 2013.

“Nelson Mandela: Comrade.” Al Jazeera International. Web. 15 December 2013.

“The Myth of Institutional Autonomy?” Mail and Guardian. 7 June 2013.

“Decolonising the Humanities.” Mail and Guardian. 4 April 2013.

Heidi Grunebaum

‐‐ and Mark Kaplan, “The South Africa Forest in Israel: Seeing the wood and the trees.”

Op Ed. Cape Times. Friday 7 June, 2013.

Heidi Grunebaum, “The Making of The Village Under the Forest.” Voices of the South.

Karibu Foundation. Web. August 2013: 1‐3.

Premesh Lalu

“Concept of the post‐apartheid can help the humanities.” Mail and Guardian. 7 June 2013.

“Mandela is very much with us.” Economic and Political Weekly, XLVIII, 28, July (Delhi: 2013). Subsequently published on the blogsite, “Africa is a Country”, New York, and in the Cape Times as “Under Madiba’s enormous shadow”, 18 July 2013. Translated into Spanish as “¿Cuál es el legado del pensamiento de Nelson Mandela?” Universidad de Nasional San Martin, Buenos Aires.

Interviewed by Juan Obarrio, “The Humanities in South Africa”, Universidad Nasional de San Martin, Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Interviewed by Natalia Aruguete, “El neoliberalismo es…” Pagina12. Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Exclusive Interview by Ibrahim Tigli and Jalal Rayi on the passing of Nelson Mandela.

World Bulletin. Turkey. December 2013.

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Film

After four years of work, Heidi Grunebaum and Mark Kaplan’s feature‐length documentary film, The Village Under the Forest (Grey Matter Media, 2013), had its world premier at the Encounters South African International Documentary Festival in June 2013.

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Unfolding as a personal meditation from the Jewish diaspora, The Village Under The Forest explores the hidden remains of the destroyed Palestinian village of Lubya, which lies under a purposefully cultivated forest plantation called South Africa Forest. Using the forest and the village ruins as metaphors, the documentary explores themes related to the erasure of the Palestinian Nakba (catastrophe) and the persistence of memory.

Through a multi‐layered visual, aural and narrative assemblage, the film asks that we imagine a shared future as an ethical obligation in which dignity, acknowledgement, return and co‐habitation may be possible in Israel/Palestine.

The Village Under the Forest won the 2013 Encounters South African International Documentary Festival audience award for best South African documentary of 2013. Its world premier at the festival (6‐16 June) was covered widely in national, electronic media and film industry publications, as well as in reviews and interviews with the filmmakers in The Cape Times, The Citizen, The Mail & Guardian, Die Burger, The New Age, The Star, and The Times, in Biz Community, The Callsheet, Channel Africa, Channel Islam, Film Contact, The Financial Mail, Lotus FM, Morning Live, Radio 786, Bush Radio, SABC2 morning television and Voice of The Cape. International reviews and coverage include Mondoweiss, The Daily Beast, and mentions in The New York Times and The Washington Post. The Village under the Forest screened to sold‐out audiences at the Tri Continental Human Rights film festival in South Africa (September 13‐29), at independent cinemas, the Labia (Cape Town), The Nielsie (Stellenbosch), The Bioscope (Johannesburg), and Spiga D’Oro (Durban), as well as at the District 6 Museum. In November it screened at the Cape Town City Hall as part of the GIPCA institute’s week‐ long and city‐wide “LAND” event curated by Jay Pather. Screenings were followed by lively discussions in audience Q & A’s with the filmmakers. In January 2014, the film will be screened at UCT’s Summer School as part of an offering on contemporary issues in the Middle East. The Village Under the Forest was also selected for the Boston Palestine Festival held at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, USA, and was an official selection for the competition section of ‘Al Ard’ Film Festival, Sardinia, Italy. In November, Arabic and Hebrew subtitled versions of the film were screened at the first Heidi Grunebaum and Mark Kaplan during ever film festival on the Palestinian the Q & A session after the screening of their Nakba in Israel, organized by Zochrot, film, The Village Under the Forest, 2013 and screened at the Tel Aviv Encounters South African International Cinemateque. In 2014 the film will Documentary Festival, Fugard Theatre, Cape screen at festivals and events in Town, 10 June 2013. Photograph courtesy of Europe, North America, Africa and the the Encounters South African International Documentary Festival Middle East.

The deepening attention in the area of Aesthetics and Politics that is being given to work in film and film studies will include a new postgraduate offering in film and media studies. The module, “Open form, Open Text – Rethinking Documentary Film”, will be convened and taught by documentary filmmaker Francois Verster, to be hosted by the English Department in 2014.

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Seminar programme

Professor Patricia Hayes [History] convened and chaired the weekly South African Contemporary History and Humanities Seminar. Established in 1993, the seminar is the longest running seminar series in Southern Africa and continues to draw together faculty, graduate students and research fellows from across the Faculty of Arts. Seminars are organised around a pre‐circulated paper with an appointed respondent. The 2013 schedule reflects the growing national and international reputation of the seminar series.

12 February: Geraldine Frieslaar (CHR, UWC) and Olusegun Morakinyo (Robben Island Museum), The UWC‐Robben Island Museum Mayibuye Archives and the African Programme in Museum and Heritage Studies (APMHS) in the nexus of Public Historical Scholarship. Discussant: Helena Pohlandt‐McCormick (University of Minnesota)

19 February: Dag Henrichsen (Basler Afrika Bibliographien, Switzerland) in collaboration with the South African Empire workshop, The travels of Hans Schinz in southwestern Africa (1884‐1886): Biological transfer and the professionalization and popularization of (African) botany in Zurich. Discussant: Shirley Brooks (UWC)

26 February: Phindezwa Mnyaka (CHR, UWC), Pursuits of a heroic vision and the ambivalence of the photographic field: Joseph Denfield’s treks through Nigeria and Basutoland, 1944‐1958. Discussant: Lorena Rizza (UWC/University of Basel)

26 March: Paige Sweet (CHR, UWC), Unauthorized Appropriations: Anxieties of Creative Surplus. Discussant: Herman Wittenberg (UWC)

9 April: Sarah V. Melton (Emory University), The Birmingham Civil Rights Institute and the Challenges of a Global Public History of Apartheid. Discussant: Noëleen Murray

16 April: Helena Pohlandt‐McCormick (CHR, UWC/ICGC University of Minnesota), Taking Risks in the Post‐Colonial Archive: Towards a Postcolonial Thinking of the Archive.

Discussant: Ciraj Rassool

23 April: Diane Detournay (CHR, UWC), Feminism, Racial Difference and the Category of Women: The Civilisational Architecture of Women’s Human Rights and Transnational Feminism. Discussant: Desiree Lewis (UWC)

30 April: Giacomo Loperfido (CHR, UWC), Crisis and the changing parameters of social existence: Xenophobia as a side‐effect of systemic reorganization. Discussant: Laurence Piper (UWC)

7 May: Alan Mabin (University of the Witwatersrand), Debating ‘southern theory’ and cities of the south (and the north) of the world: Conceptual problems, issues of method and empirical research. Discussant: Ruchi Chaturvedi (UWC)

14 May: Roger Field (UWC) The Classics, mythology and African Literature. Discussant: Mark Hermans (UWC)

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21 May: Ross Truscott (CHR, UWC), Oedipus and the post‐apartheid nation: A South African story of disavowal. Discussant: Tammy Shefer (UWC)

16 July: G. Arunima (Centre for Women’s Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi), Intimate portraits: Sunil Gupta, Dayanita Singh, and experiments with the photographic image. Discussant Heike Behrend (Berlin).

23 July: Marissa Moorman (History Department, Indiana University), Radio Remediated: La Vie Sur Terre and Moolaadé. Discussant Patricia Hayes (UWC).

30 July: John and Jean Comaroff (African and African‐American Studies, & Anthropology, Harvard University), The Return of Khulekani Khumalo, Zombie Captive: Identity, Law, and Paradoxes of Personhood in the Postcolony. Discussant: Premesh Lalu (CHR UWC).

6 August: Carlos Fernandes (CHR, UWC), ‘We Shall Never Forget!’ – The Politics of ‘Organised Remembrance’ and State Legitimization in Post‐colonial Mozambique: The History Workshop (1980‐1986). Discussant Ciraj Rassool (UWC).

13 August: Naomi Scheman (Gender, Women’s & Sexuality Studies Department, University of Minnesota), The “extraordinary ordinary” and notes towards Stones, Stories, and the Twenty‐first Century Research University: A provocation. Discussant Paige Sweet (UWC).

20 August: Premesh Lalu (Centre for Humanities Research, UWC), The absent centre: human capital, nationalism and the postcolonial critique of apartheid. Discussant: Paolo Israel (UWC).

27 August: Richa Nagar (University of Minnesota), Five truths of story telling and coauthorship in feminist alliance work. Discussant: Naomi Scheman (UMN).

10 September: Maurits van Bever Donker (CHR, UWC), On the limit of community: coming to terms with apartheid's grounds. Discussant: Ross Trusscott (CHR, UWC).

17 September: Marijke du Toit (Historical Studies, University of KwaZulu‐Natal), “Anginayo ngisho indibilishi!” The Gender Politics of “Native welfare” in Durban, 1930‐ 1939. Discussant: Siphokazi Sambumbu (CHR, UWC).

1 October: Ciraj Rassool (History Department, UWC), District Six Revisited. (This seminar was presented in partnership with the African Programme in Museum and Heritage studies (UWC and Robben Island Museum). Discussant: Shaun Viljoen (Stellenbosch University).

8 October: Anna Selmeczi (UWC and University of Fort Hare), Dis/placing political illiteracy. Discussant: Bernard Dubbeld (Stellenbosch University).

15 October: Victoria J. Collis‐Buthelezi (English Department, UCT), Carribean Regionalism, South Africa and Redefining New World Studies. Discussant: Maurits van Bever Donker (UWC).

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22 October: Rob Gordon (Department of Anthropology, University of Vermont and University of the Free State), Mary and Max in the Mongu Masquerade: Gluckman’s fieldwork adventures in Loziland. Discussant: Andrew Bank (UWC).

29 October: Leslie Witz (History Department, UWC), Hunting for Museums. Discussant: Shirley Brookes (UWC).

5 November: A documentary film by Mark J. Kaplan and Heidi Grunebaum, "The Village under the forest ‐ When greening is an act of obliteration”, followed by a Q & A session with the director and scriptwriter.

Committee service

Premesh Lalu continued to serve as Deputy Dean for Research in the Faculty of Arts, and served on various faculty committees, including the Arts Higher Degrees Committee, and Arts Research and Study Leave Committee. He is also a member of Senate, and the Senate International Relations Committee.

Lalu serves as chair of the Handspring Trust, and was nominated to serve on the International Consortium of Humanities Centres and Institutes. In 2013 he was appointed to serve as a member of a review panel of the Humanities Faculty at the University of Johannesburg.

Suren Pillay serves on the Senate International Relations Committee, as well as the Arts Faculty’s General Appointments Committee. He also taught a graduate level course on Political Violence in the Dept. of Political Studies.

Heidi Grunebaum has taught undergraduate courses on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in the History Department. She has developed and teaches an undergraduate course about historical debates on the 1948 War for Palestine in the History Department.

A mural in the city of Buenos Aires, Argentina, October 2013. The photo was taken during Premesh Lalu’s visit to the National University of General San Martin. Photograph: Premesh Lalu

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Appendix A

Report on the Special Ministerial Committee’s Catalytic Project, “Hidden Voices in Art and Music”,

by Heidi Grunebaum and Premesh Lalu

The following narrative refers to the period May 2013 – November 2013.

The initial seed grant to the CHR at UWC enabled a public consultation on the scope of the project on “Hidden Voices in Art and Music”. At the consultation held at Iziko South African National Gallery on 16 February 2013, and attended by approximately 80 arts practitioners and humanities scholars, a common recommendation emerged which suggested the need to build a partnership that would attend to revitalising the discussion about the role of the arts and education in postapartheid South Africa.

In keeping with the proposal to the HSS Catalytic Project Steering Committee, we recommended the appointment of three artists in residence to:

1) reflect on the humanities curricula as these relate to specific art practices and community arts initiatives; 2) facilitate the development of three collaborative public arts projects that would encourage postgraduate research on the theme of hidden voices in the arts; 3) build inter‐institutional collaborations in the humanities across universities, and across sites of public culture and artistic production.

Musicians and poets performing during the Insurrections concert, a musical dialogue between Indian and South African musicians that featured, among others, CHR artist in residence, Neo Muyanga, Fugard Theatre, Cape Town, October 2012. Photograph: Omar Badsha

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The first stage of our project involved integrating the artists in residence into the CHR and opening a set of discussions about the potential of collaboration between artists, scholars and postgraduate students in the humanities.

With this report, we are excited to present the achievements of this project for the past six months. The report emphasises the individual contributions of the three artists in residence, Neo Muyanga, Mongi Mthombeni and Emile Maurice. In each case, the artists in residence have participated in seminars and discussions in the CHR and in collaborating partnerships, whilst making substantial progress on their respective artistic projects and productions.

Two members of the Insurrections Ensemble performing at a concert organised jointly by the CHR and South African History Online (SAHO), Fugard Theatre, Cape Town, October 2012.

Photograph: Omar Badsha

Artist in Residence Neo Muyanga

Muyanga is currently investigating aesthetics in the liberation song form through a compositional study of collections of audio recordings from the UWC‐Robben Island Mayibuye Archives, which include:

1) live protest marches of the 1980s and 1990s; 2) recordings of the 1980s broadcasts of Radio Freedom, the ANC radio station in exile; 3) documentary films about the ANC Culture Desk in exile.

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The past six months have been a veritable whirlwind period for Muyanga’s research towards an original operatic production on aesthetics and the liberation songs of South Africa. The research towards the envisaged production remains the central fulcrum around which Muyanga’s activities have revolved.

Thus far a set of 21 liberation songs found in the archive have been transcribed into conventional staff notation.

Muyanga has begun to re‐arrange and re‐compose some of the transcribed material into new original works.

In fulfillment of the fellowship requirements, and in collaboration with the CHR’s Catalytic Project partners, Muyanga has also participated in the following events at which his research on the sound and music archives were presented and discussed:

A special workshop on aesthetics and protest convened during the Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism (JWTC), hosted by the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (Wiser) at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) (28 June – 2 July, 2013). The aim of this workshop was to tease out and compare the aesthetics of protest song and story‐telling modalities in South Africa and Egypt. Muyanga’s collaborators in the workshop were El Warsha, one of Egypt's oldest independent and most successful cultural troupes. El Warsha participated in protests at Tahrir Square in Cairo during 2011 and 2013. Following his involvement with the JWTC workshop, Muyanga participated in the CHR’s annual Winter School (8 – 11 July, 2013), entitled ‘Acts to Ground’.

Muyanga participated in a composers’ panel during the Hearing Landscape Critically conference at Stellenbosch University (10 – 11 September, 2013). Here the focus of discussion was on composition that is inspired by questions of the politics of land and exile. This was followed by a presentation and discussion of Muyanga’s research into aesthetics and protest, as well as of related themes in his work, at Columbia University's studio @programme, hosted by Prof Rosalind Morris and Prof Yvette Christianse of the Africana Studies Department at Barnard College, New York (24 September 2013).

Muyanga presented his research on Radio Freedom sound clips and questions of aesthetic resonance, and discussed postgraduate students’ presentations at the Music and Politics workshop, hosted by the CHR and the Department of History, UWC (11 October 2013).

Muyanga has also been invited to give a presentation and lecture on his investigation into aesthetics, protest and curating experimental art platforms in a Pan African context at the Tate Modern, Tate Gallery, London (29 November 2013).

Finally, Muyanga has been invited to contribute an article that was published in Cityscapes Magazine to a publication of the African Centre for Cities, UCT, which will appear in 2013.

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Top and bottom: Neo Muyanga (left) performing with members of the Cairo based troupe, El Warsha, Goethe‐Institut South Africa, Johannesburg, 29 June 2013. Photograph courtesy of the Goethe‐Institut

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Residential Fellowship Mongi Mthombeni

Mthombeni, in collaboration with Handspring Puppet Trust and the Magpie Art Collective, redeveloped the Net Vir Pret production, ‘Skillie di Skilpad’, for the UNIMA festival (21‐26 October 2013). This was an opportunity to work on a much stronger production of ‘Skillie di Skilpad’, an original work made by Net Vir Pret.

In preparation for the UNIMA festival performance, Mthombeni took the company through the following areas of training, rehearsal and work: puppet design, performance training and direction. The entire company of Net Vir Pret performers travelled to Cape Town to work with Mthombeni. Under Mthombeni’s daily training regime, the company also worked with Jill Joubert (founder of Handspring Puppet Company) to redesign the puppets, and with Handspring Puppet Company members to work on set redesign.

In terms of preparations for performance, Mthombeni explored several elements with the young performers of the Net Vir Pret Company. In the warm up work, for example, performers engaged in:

 Group synergy exercise in which energy is passed, focussed and contained at a high level by the group. This increases the group’s performance energy;  Count 1,2,3 exercises to develop concentration, attunement, and focus in the group.  Clap Game and rhythmic exercises that engage the body to draw and release performative energy from it.  Voice warm ups, identifying resonance and locating sound within the body.

For rehearsal work, Mthombeni took the company through focused and thorough learning of the text as very little creative work can come out when the text is not thoroughly familiarised and internalised. The musicality of the story of ‘Skillie’ was used at the start in order to charge the audience and the space for the show. Mthombeni also looked at the choral work used in other musical aspects of the show.

In rehearsals, Mthombeni challenged the group’s performance with puppets, especially regarding the convention of performers hiding. Instead, he pushed the company to explore a staging of the work with performers being visible when manipulating the puppets. This was successful and enabled the audience to also reference the emotions of the puppets from the faces of the performers. First explorations into puppet manipulation were extended by looking at syncing the performer’s voice and intention into the puppet. To do this, the company first impersonated the puppets (told the story with the actual puppets, but with performers doing the role). The performers then looked to bring what they learnt from internalising the story into their bodies and brought those insights to the characterisation of the puppets.

The performance at the UNIMA festival took place on 25 October 2013 at the Gugulethu Library. The Net Vir Pret company gained valuable experience from performing for audiences outside and beyond Barrydale at the UNIMA festival. Currently, discussions

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are underway with organisers of the Zabalaza Festival for the redesigned ‘Skillie di Skiplad’ to be performed at the festival’s next installment.

Mthombeni worked with the participating groups, Magpie Arts Collective, Net Vir Pret, Handspring Trust and the CHR in Barrydale on a puppet theatre production and street parade on ‘Karoo See’ for the annual parade on 15 December 2013. The project involved work with school youth in workshops on story‐telling, youth training in puppetry‐ making, and training in theatre direction and production. This project brought together leading artists, such as Jill Joubert (founder of Handspring Puppet Company), Basil Jones and Adrian Kohler (Handspring Puppet Company), Shane Petzer (Magpie Art Collective), Janni Younge (Handspring Puppet Company), Derek Joubert (founder of the Community Arts Project), Pieter Tolker (Net Vir Pret) and Jane Taylor (CHR, UWC).

Over the past 6 months, Mthombeni wrote the first draft of a play for the Royal Court theatre. He produced and filmed ‘The Ghost Sonata’, which is currently in post‐production. In addition, Mthombeni is developing and researching several short stories towards a new physical theatre project. Two short stories in development currently are ‘Only The Young Die Young’ and ‘Automata of Su Song’.

Finally, Mthombeni also participated in the Music and Politics workshop hosted by the CHR and the department of History, UWC (11 October 2013), at which his discussion on workshop presentations explored and extended notions of listening through concepts of embodiment, resonance, affect and movement.

Mongi Mthombeni (blue shirt) preparing for the puppet parade, Barrydale, Western Cape, December 2013. Adrian Kohler, a founder of the Handspring Puppet Company, appears on the left in the bottom right photograph. Photographs: Jonathan Jones

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CHR, Handspring Trust, Net vir Pret, Magpie Art Collective Annual Parade, 15 December 2013, Barrydale, Western Cape. Photographs: Robyn‐Leigh Swart

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CHR, Handspring Trust, Net vir Pret, Magpie Art Collective Annual Parade, 15 December 2013, Barrydale, Western Cape. Photographs: Robyn‐Leigh Swart

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Youth performers from the Net Vir Pret Company rehearsing for the 2013 ‘Karoo See’ festival in Barrydale, Western Cape, under the guidance of Mongi Mthombeni, Cape Town, 2013. Photographer unknown

Residential Fellowship Emile Maurice

During the past six months, Maurice has worked on developing and curating an exhibition on Nelson Mandela’s legacy. The exhibition features about 110 photographs and approximately 24 local and international posters drawn from the UWC‐Robben Island Mayibuye Archives, the Visual Archives at the UCT Library and the Oryx Media archive. The Nelson Mandela Foundation and the National Archives of South Africa also assisted with securing some photographs. The photographs on the exhibition are by Benny Gool, Paul Grendon, Chris Ledochowski, Paul Weinberg,

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Louise Gubb, Graeme Williams, Eli Weinberg, Mary Benson, Billy Paddock and Dave Hartman.

Maurice also participated in the Music and Politics workshop hosted by the CHR and the Department of History, UWC (11 October 2013).

The exhibition, ‘Nelson Mandela – A Life of Selfless Service’, curated by Emile Maurice, Great Hall, UWC, December 2013. Photographs: Emile Maurice

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The Community Arts Project (CAP) Collection/Archive

The CAP Archival Project

The CHR is committed to exploring the relation between aesthetics, politics and society in order to contribute to a post‐apartheid sensibility. In keeping with its thematic concerns, the CHR acquired an important and historic body of artworks in 2008 – the Community Arts Project (CAP) Archive/Collection. The CAP Archival Project, which involves the documentation and accessioning of the CAP Collection, is ongoing. So far, about 1,200 of the estimated 3,500 works in the Archive (prints, posters, paintings, drawings and sculptures) have been accessioned and photographed. The intention is to produce a number of CDs as a record of the entire Collection. So far, two CDs of the entire Print Collection have been produced. Digitisation and accessioning of this historic collection continues.

Uncontained: Opening the Community Arts Project Archive – the exhibition

Curated by Emile Maurice, ‘Uncontained: Opening the Community Arts Project Archive’ is an exhibition of prints selected from the CAP Archive/Collection. The exhibition introduces the linocuts from the Collection, a medium intimately associated with both the now defunct community arts project movement and the history of modern black art practice in South Africa. The title of the exhibition literally refers to the unpacking of the works from boxes and to the opening to the public of a collection of artworks that has largely lain dormant in the storerooms of CAP and its offshoot, the Arts and Media Access Centre. It also refers to the re‐activation of the CAP Archive from its neglect by mainstream cultural history. Most of the prints on exhibition are from the turbulent 1980s, the decade marked in history as the final push against apartheid in South Africa.

Overall, ‘Uncontained’ offers a complex narrative about human experience, imagination, and social, personal and political relations in the world of apartheid and its aftermath.

The exhibition has been held twice – at Art.b Gallery in Bellville (8 May – 18 June 2012) and at Iziko South African National Gallery in Cape Town (18 August 2012 – 12 April 2013). Plans are afoot to travel the exhibition to the rural areas of the Cape and possibly to the University of the Wiwatersrand (Wits) in Johannesburg.

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Poet Rustum Kozain opening the exhibition, ‘Uncontained: Opening the Community Arts Project Archive’, Art.b Gallery, Bellville, 8 May 2012. Photograph: Tiaan van Deventer

A banner outside Iziko South African National Gallery advertising the exhibition, ‘Uncontained: Opening the Community Arts Project Archive’ (18 August 2012 – 12 April 2013).

Photograph: Mark van Niekerk

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‘Uncontained: Opening the Community Arts Project Archive’ – the book

The book, Uncontained: Opening the Community Arts Project Archive, which accompanies the exhibition of the same title, was the outcome of a writing project on the CAP Print Collection, initiated by the CHR. Edited by Heidi Grunebaum and Emile Maurice, the book comprises contributions by 31 authors from universities, cultural organisations and NGOs. Each author was invited to write a ‘thought‐piece’ on a particular set of artworks from the CAP Print Collection. The texts offer a variety of approaches and perspectives and, in different ways, are all contributions to re‐vitalising the question of the human condition that remains at the heart of current‐day post‐ apartheid society.

Uncontained: Opening the Community Arts Project Archive was reviewed by Mario Pissarra for Third Text Africa and by Matthew Reisz for the Times Higher Education, “the leading general interest magazine aimed at the British academic and beyond.”

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Public discussion: Uncontained: Opening the Community Arts Project Archive

Why have some artistic voices remained hidden after the end of apartheid in 1994? This was the topic at a panel discussion at Iziko South African National Gallery (Iziko SANG) on 16 February 2013. Panellists included curator and author Emile Maurice of the CHR, artists Vuyile Voyiya and Dathini Mzayiya, and art historian Julie McGee. The discussion was hosted by Iziko Museums of Cape Town and the CHR, and the panel was chaired by Heidi Grunebaum, Senior Researcher at the CHR. What prompted the discussion on hidden voices in the present in particular was the exhibition, ‘Uncontained: opening the Community Arts Project Archive’, which, at the time, was on view at Iziko SANG.

E‐vite for the public discussion, “What do we mean by ‘hidden voices’ in the arts after apartheid?” jointly organised by the CHR and Iziko, 16 February 2013

Participants in the panel discussion on why some artistic voices have remained hidden after the end of apartheid in 1994, Iziko South African National Gallery, 16 February 2013. Left to right: Heidi Grunebaum (chairperson), Julie McGee, Dathini Mzayiya, Vuyile Voyiya and Emile Maurice.

Photograph: Carina Beyer

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Public programme: workshops and tours Besides the panel discussion at Iziko South African National Gallery, the public programme accompanying ‘Uncontained: Opening the Community Arts Project Archive’ also consisted of workshops and public tours at both Iziko and Art.b Gallery.

Right: Emile Maurice, curator of ‘Uncontained: Opening the Community Arts Project Archive’, conducting a tour of the exhibition, Iziko South African National Gallery, 24 September 2012 (Heritage Day)

The exhibition, ‘Uncontained: Opening the Community Arts Project Archive’, was accompanied by a public programme. Here artist Garth Erasmus conducts a linocutting workshop, Art.b Gallery, Bellville, 23 June 2012. Photographs: Tiaan van Deventer

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Publications and awards Heidi Grunebaum and Emile Maurice (eds.), Uncontained: Opening the Community Arts Project Archive. Cape Town: CHR, UWC, 2012.

Emile Maurice, “The Community Arts Project” in Heidi Grunebaum and Emile Maurice (eds.), Uncontained: Opening the Community Arts Project Archive. Cape Town: CHR, UWC, 2012.

Emile Maurice, “The exhibition, ‘Uncontained: Opening the Community Arts Project Archive’” in Heidi Grunebaum and Emile Maurice (eds.), Uncontained: Opening the Community Arts Project Archive. Cape Town: CHR, UWC, 2012.

Emile Maurice, “Resistance Art” in in Heidi Grunebaum and Emile Maurice (eds.), Uncontained: Opening the Community Arts Project Archive. Cape Town: CHR, UWC, 2012.

Emile Maurice, “Thami Mnyele (Raid on Gaborone)” in Heidi Grunebaum and Emile Maurice (eds.), Uncontained: Opening the Community Arts Project Archive. Cape Town: CHR, UWC, 2012.

Emile Maurice, “Role of the artist” in Heidi Grunebaum and Emile Maurice (eds.), Uncontained: Opening the Community Arts Project Archive. Cape Town: CHR, UWC, 2012.

Emile Maurice, “Realising Humanity – The CAP Collection” in PremeshLalu and Noëleen Murray (eds.), Becoming UWC: Reflections, Pathways and Unmaking Apartheid’s Legacy Cape Town: CHR, UWC, 2012.

Emile Maurice. 2013. “Curating Uncontained: Opening the Community Arts Project Archive.”[Online]. Available at: http://www.archivalplatform.org/blog/entry/cu (accessed 4 November 2013) Emile Maurice. 2013. “Hidden Voices: Art and the Erasure of Memory in Post‐apartheid South Africa”. [Online]. Available at: http://www.archivalplatform.org/blog/entry/hic (accessed 4 November 2013) The Faculty of Arts at UWC awarded Heidi Grunebaum and Emile Maurice the 2013 Publications Award (Creative Work) for their work as editors on the book, Uncontained: Opening the Community Arts Project Archive.

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Appendix B

Report on the Third Annual Winter School by Siân Butcher

It is auspicious that this year’s Third Annual Winter School ‘grounded’ itself at the foot of Paarl Mountain. In a district that had been ablaze with farmworker protest at the end of 2012. In the shadow of the Afrikaanse Taalmonument built in 1975.

Across ‘the tracks’ from the 1962 Mbekweni massacre1. Next to a monument to the ‘Anglo-Boer’, or South African, war and the Kaapse rebelle erected in 2005. Amongst vineyards grown by settled ‘free burghers’, Huguenots and their less-free labour force since 1687. In a verdant valley under the ‘Tortoise Mountain’ of the Khoikhoi and Cochoqua people. In the 100th year since the 1913 Land Act, as the organizers reminded us in the opening day’s remarks.

On this saturated, contested ground, what does it mean to consider and work through “the politics of the humanities”, and its “stakes”? What did we make of our guiding concepts for the 2013 School: ‘ground’ and ‘grounding’, ‘act’ and ‘acting’, and their acting together – “Acts to Ground”? How does ‘truth’ and its telling – our Foucauldian coordinates – figure in this landscape of beauty and violence; dispossession and exploitation; continuity and change? What truths did we tell around our own crowded table? What did we do with our concepts in this ‘context’?

Our time at Paarl was organised differently from the previous two winter schools, by dint of increasing size and demand for more discussion time around graduate students’ work. One session each day was devoted to a theme and presentations by a faculty member and a post- doc, followed by an afternoon ‘breakaway’ for discussion of grad work in progress in relation to theory and archives. These afternoon sessions were consolidated in an all-day joint student-faculty workshop back at UWC on evidence and dissertation writing.

The following notes concentrate on the thematic session of each day of the retreat and connected lectures. They are not exhaustive – the full papers and presentations are available for detailed readings – but hopefully remind us of some of the animating concepts and conversations of the 2013 Winter School. The floating text boxes pick up key Q & A contributions and connections made in relation to the

1

Thanks to Nicky Rousseau for sharing this history around the 1962 march from Mbekweni to Paarl, in which the police shot dead 7 people, and arrested 350; followed by a Commission of Enquiry, which became articulated with the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya. 18 of the 350 arrested were executed between 1963 and 1967.

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presentations. The bolded words are an attempt to track keywords and recurring concepts.

July 5: John Mowitt & Sanil V.’s conversation on Foucault’s “The Courage of Truth” and “Fearless Speech” (Last lectures, UC Berkeley, Fall 1983) (UWC) For John, these last lectures and the concept of Parrhesia offer a chance to think the relationship between power and truth in Foucault’s thinking (rather than a shift in his thinking from one to the other) – and in relation to Foucault’s genealogy of the subject and subjection that he becomes more interested in towards the end of his life (especially a “desiring subject” and how subjects participate in and arise from their subjection to interpret their lives and subjection through “small acts”). John traced a genealogy here for us, from how Foucault’s Hermeneutics of the Subject, and his own facing up to death and critique of his work from the Left, leads him to more fully work through parrhesia in relation to Socrates’ death and Dumézil’s Cynics. He asked that we pause over parrhesia’s various translations as “the courage of truth” vs. “fearless speech”. Parrhesia is not about freedom of speech, but rather saying all that can be said, and an openess (perhaps enabled by friendship) in relation to Others that makes us speak, while at the same demanding frankness. The opposite of parrhesia then is not untruth, but the act of silence. In putting Foucault to work, John also reminded us that for Derrida, truth is not a matter of courage, but is a law, an instinct, a drive. “It cannot NOT be said”. This points to something more primordial than courage.

Sanil reminded us that the ethical turn in these last lectures came as a surprise to students of Foucault, who had early on noted that Western modernist though could not propose an ethics after the 19th century, and instead becomes preoccupied with the study of human finitude in the form of the social sciences. In these lectures, we have Foucault – “a positivist” interested in a way out of this “ontology of human finitude” via the ethical. But Foucault is most interested in who the truthteller is, and how we might recognise her (through 4 modes of truth-telling) – rather than mapping out a universal conception of truth. This, then, is an ethics based on a particular-particular relation, rather than a universal-particular one. And truth is less about being an answer, than that which comes out “of a certain hiddenness” – truth might be an “unhiddenness” then. And instead of focusing on the answers – which are responses to questions – Foucault’s attempt is to get at truth at the nascent level of questions, before the moment of answers. Neither do these questions have to be resolved;

Helena (8/7): Why this particular text as ‘required reading’?

Why this Courage of the Truth? It opened the space for considering both the impossibility of truth-telling in democracy, and truth in relation to ethics and spirituality

Lectures at the Collège de France, 1983-4 Lectures at the Collège de France, 1981-2 In the lectures at Berkeley, Fall 1983

The prophet; the sage; the teacher and the parrhesiast with their “four modes of veridiction” – prophecy, wisdom, teaching & parrhesia

Naomi (8/7): returns us to this issue of questions and answers via Rilke.

“How do we insist on asking questions that don’t have an answer?” when our epistemes demand that we pose questions, methods and then answers?

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problematisation, and the mystery, can continue. Sanil ended with a discussion of the relationship between knowledge and truth (from Plato’s notion of knowledge as “justified true belief”; or as disciplinarily determined in The Order of Things); truth and politics (via the example of Gandhi and his response to the 1935 Bihar earthquake – the embarrassment of being spared this human suffering, and his “crude” parrhestic exposure of this shame); truth and pedagogy (the Laches example from The Courage of Truth). Here, Sanil reminded us of the difference between “fearlessness” and “courage” – the latter is a rational fear, aware of its risks, the possibility of pain.

July 8: Start of the Paarl retreat; two films Helena introduces the Winter School, and calls on us to read these two films, to “watch them with distrust. They are not movies as truth. Watch them as prompts, as a series of questions”.

“Cemetary State” (2010) directed by Belgian anthropologist Filip De Boeck about Kinshasa’s graveyard of Kintambo, as “physical embodiment” of the crisis of the DRC state, and demonstrating how life and death is “never a straight story” in Kinshasa, a city filled with bodies who’s insides are elsewhere, who are dreaming of lives elsewhere.

“Last Grave at Dimbaza” (1973) made by the PAC with the support of the Defence & Aid Fund about inequality in white and black life and death under apartheid South Africa in cities and homelands.

While viewing, Gary & Helena pass round white sheets of A4 paper with red words written on them like ‘abide’, ‘disorderly’, ‘things’, ‘archive’, ‘hiddenness’, ‘cynic’, ‘physics’, ‘hand’, ‘land’, ‘community’, ‘grave’, ‘routes’, ‘revolutions’, ‘speech’, ‘fearless’, ‘appeal’, ‘intelligibility’, ‘death’, ‘spirituality’, etc.

John’s comments on these through the concepts of “filmic enunciation” and “filmic statement”: the first bearing on the matter of the articulation of the form and content of a film; the second bearing on the form of the content. He sees a conflict between enunciation and statement in both these films. While the statement is one “we might generally call ‘correct’” the enunciation is not, and undermines the efficacy of their statements.

Leslie’s defence: “How do we think Dimbaza in its 1970s context?” The film points to other ways of talking about politics before Soweto, e.g. in the vein of international labour solidarity.

This started a longrunning conversation about context that surfaced in multiple sessions

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July 8: The Political Unconscious of the Humanities (Paarl) John Mowitt & Ross Truscott In a set of “looser weave” notes, John drew on three texts – by Jameson, Benjamin and Lacan – to think the “political unconscious” with. How ought the “political” and the “unconscious” to “interfere” with one another, and in what relation to the humanities? Through these texts, he posed a challenge to the humanities to - move the study of politics beyond a focus on “political behaviour” to “political acts” – which is about getting at the desires, fears, etc. that give shape to political behaviours such as voting, campaigning, marching, etc. – a task that the humanities is singularly well-placed to assist with - to engage the tools of psychoanalysis in relation to literary and filmic critique to do this work, and vice versa to avoid the pitfalls of psychoanalysis’ perceived individualism (although Freud is adamant that the self is always formed in relation to others – “there are no encounters with yourself in any unmediated way”). “The political unconscious deals with the collective”.

This might make for a more courageous version of the humanities – “as a site of danger, risk”, not defensiveness, in relation to the ‘political’. He concludes with attention to feminist work that brings Marxism and psychoanalysis together, to think what politics might be possible. Politics becomes about transforming where the relation of subordination is and how it can be transformed.

Ross’s work is an example of such a heterodox engagement with psychoanalysis. Re-reading Freud’s analysis of Schreberian compassion alongside Foucault’s Order of Things, Ross traced a genealogy of the empathetic subject (‘empathy’ being a key “methodological apparatus of the humanities and humanism”, that is increasing powerful in the present as a means of engaging the Other and the political). The kinds of questions this engagement with psychoanalysis enable include: What is the unconscious of empathy? What is its prehistory?

How have the modern disciplines related to empathy? What are the relationships between ethnology, scientific racism and empathy? What is the relationship between narcissism and empathy - what does this say about the “libidinal economy of empathy”, its erotic elements, as opened up by the Schreber case? Ross ends by articulating this with the “libidinal economy of apartheid”, and how we might surface “the occluded relationship between acts of repressed homoerotic apartheid violence and postapartheid discourse of empathy”, that surface in the “quintessential homosocial nation-building event” after apartheid – the corrective rate of lesbians – and in

Ruchi (8/7) made a connection between the tension between the individual and the collective as that of the problem of democracy. She also drew attention to the way in which the democratic collective is imagined as a “fraternal contract”, between brothers, to undo the father Qadri (8/7) picked up on this notion of defensiveness: from a postcolonial perspective, the humanities cannot be defended, because the founding category of ‘human’ relies on its opposition to the ‘uncivilised savage’, the colonised. These oppositions persist in the unconscious of the humanities Diane (8/7) asked how we are to more fully understand empathy’s relations to race and sexuality.

And what does the psychoanalytic subject do for understanding apartheid violence?

Sanil (8/7) distinguished between primary and secondary narcissism

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empathy for oppressors like de Kock in essays such as “A human being died that night”.

July 9: Cultures and Society (Paarl) Qadri Ismail & Diane Detournay Diane shared a section from her book project, which investigates the category ‘woman’ in the institutionalisation of ‘Gender Studies’ in the US academy and argues that this category is made not via sexual difference but racial difference. ‘Woman’ becomes human in relation to the savage, not man – the savage is its “constitutive outside”. She poses a challenge to intersectional approaches which align all categories as equivalent forms of exclusion, arguing instead that race is not another ‘other’, but the overarching mechanism of difference. To ‘unhide’ this “suturing of woman-to-man” through race, Diane worked through Mary Wollstonecraft’s treatise on women’s rights, the “Vindication on the Rights of Woman” (1792) text. Here, women are argued to be educable (unlike the savage) and to be endowed with reason and capacity to make choices (not just instinct, like the ‘native’).

The salvation of civilization – from the savage – rests on the development of these capacities through education.

Ethnocentrism is “foundational” to Mary Wollstonecraft’s ‘woman’.

Qadri also shared a chapter of his book manuscript – a critique of cultural relativism – in process. He starts by tracking a genealogy of the “very recent” notion of ‘culture’, which enters the US episteme in the 1870s. Race and culture work together in this episteme, with the black savage placed in nature, and the white European in ‘culture’ – formerly, ‘society’. In response to this singularist, Eurocentrist interpretation of ‘culture’, it is the discipline of anthropology – particularly in the US – that pluralises ‘culture’, mainly through “geographic alterity”. Difference lives in different places, and difference is rendered cultural, not racial (race is displaced with culture). At the same time, these early cultural relativist texts repress their Eurocentrist unconscious, and the hierarchical structure of this pluralism (Qadri draws our attention to the texts of Boas and Geertz here, and notions that the ethnographer can ‘escape’ her culture while the Other cannot). “Boas discovers anthropology, not cultural difference”. Moving to the disciplinary reason of the present, Qadri argued that while anthropology has questioned everything else (and ‘unbounded’ culture), it cannot bring into question its primary object – culture - and cultural relativism or a “plurality of difference” remains intact. “The underpinning episteme remains intact”. Because Sri Lanka is “one of the

Bongani (9/7) asked how might we disrupt our preoccupation with categories. For example the sign in the film Last Grave at Dimbaza “goods, furniture and servants.

John (9/7) asked to what extent a discipline is like a culture? Can we hermetically seal a discipline, with a clear inside or outside?

Qadri responds that disciplines have carved territory up for themselves: the self belongs to sociology; the Other to anthropology. The self is amenable to statistics, the Other not – and thus requires participant observation.

Heidi (17/7) asked about the critique of literary studies, alongside other disciplines.

Phindi (9/7) pushed beyond ‘escape’ to posit a death instead: the death of the researcher in the study of the Other.

The staving off of death through the monograph. For Patricia, photography is also used to stave off death in this encounter.

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countries [he] is interpolated by”, Qadri ends with an example of a Sri Lankan woman activist that demonstrates the hierarchical, power-ridden work that ‘culture’ performs.

Leslie (9/7) returned to the question of context: “a reading of a series of texts has been the predominant mode of Winter School engagement” – “what happens to the category of context”, “what happens to history”? The tension between text and context. Or the “different work” of tracking a “conceptual frame”, as Diane put it, and its “iterations” in place or context.

In the conversation that ensued, there was debate about whether the demand for context was actually a question about how our work is applicable, how it is relevant – and whether that was the question we wanted to be asking ourselves. For others, the critique of history’s foundational concepts – ‘event’, ‘agent’, ‘place’, ‘cause’ – render the doing of ‘history’ impossible. Qadri asked “what is the context of context?” Context itself is a product, and the deconstructive mode – singularly? – allows us to put these categories into question. John (17/7) didn’t pursue this “concept of context” line, but instead deployed the formulation “con text” in his later paper to denote the old English “to study, to know”, as well as “to accompany” the text. He proposed “contextualisation” instead of context, as an act, and an act to ground, not a text in a context, but grounding a reading of the text. How then do we write the social? And writing not as “getting things down” on paper, but that gets at the slippage between explaining and understanding things (that age-old debate in humanistic and social inquiry).

July 10: Techne and Aesthetics (Paarl) Sanil V. & Paige Sweet Returning us to some of the keywords of the 2012 Winter School, Sanil walked us through three terms that all surface in Foucault: techne, technology and aesthetics. Re: techne, he turned to the Dialogue between Nicias, Laches and Socrates about how to define a good teacher – the techne for the transmission of knowledge from one generation to another.

While Laches prefers discourse, Nicias prefers deeds, and Socrates sees a harmony between both. But note that truth is not allowed at the level of techne. For Foucault, truth happens in the moment of listening. Re: technology, Sanil juxtaposes Badiou (who sees no interesting questions in technology) with

Suren (9/7), as ‘selfconfessed cultural relativist’, argued that anthropology has been busy with the critique of essentialism, culture and multiculturalism for the last two decades.

For Anu (9/7) the discipline’s blindspot is its method: ethnography.

Archives are less problematic for her.

Phindi (9/7) asked that we linger a bit on this comfortdiscomfort, of studying the Other versus studying the archive.

John (10/7) drew on an example of Stiegler’s about MP3 formatting by acoustic engineers to explain tertiary memory – they make assumptions about what we can listen to, and design the format accordingly.

The way we can listen is thus already “woven into the music we are listening to”.

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Heidegger’s approach to technology as a provocation to questions, before turning to Stiegler’s four volumes Technics and Time. Technology in hyperindustrial societies destroys knowledge through automation, and becomes the third memory, in which both ‘us’ and objects are individuated.

“Technological objects have a secret life of their own”, which are integrated with human users and/or producers in a certain “human-use milieu”. In the Q&A, Sanil also pulled apart science and technology – what is the relationship there, “is science technologized or technology scientized?” As for his final ‘keyword’ - aesthetics and Kant’s two definitions (as “transcendant logic of sensations” or as “theory of art”) - Sanil is interested in the work of technology and life in relation to art and politics. For example, the symbol of Indian freedom as a technological object: that of the spinning wheel, which is also part of craft and crafting.

Here, John (10/7) asked what might be a political response from humanists against technology’s pessimistic encroachment on life, beyond embracing technological fixes to social/economic problems.

Ruchi (10/7) worried at the hyper-individuated notion of self that is embodied in a technology like the spinning wheel and its practice. For Sanil, Gandhi used the spinning wheel less as a symbol than as a means to connect freedom fighters to a social practice – 30 minutes each day.

To help us (re)think the concept of the ‘author’ and authorship, Paige juxtaposes the figure of the transgressive media pirate (who subverts capitalism’s copyright ‘laws’) with that of the legal bio pirate (northern scientists and businesses who extract and patent flora & fauna from the global South). Paige argues that informing today’s copyright and patent law – and its notions of who is a pirate and who is a patent holder - is an 18th century notion of ‘the author’. One that relies on the author as inventor, of a patented text, protected under intellectual property law (which mirrors private property law more generally). Both the bio pirate and the legitimate literary author are “figures of intellectual enclosure”, creating intellectual property through territorial and intellectual enclosures and appropriation. Her project is to “reclaim an author beyond intellectual property law”, proposing five theses extending Philip’s (2005) notion of “technological authorship” to do this work with. These take seriously the non-human in enabling authorship; challenge the legal fiction of authors’ ‘ownership’ of their work, and situate authorship in a realm of craftsmanship, as agents “manipulating existing materials” –

For Sanil, the problem with this is not that someone is selecting sound for us (the ‘who’), but that there is an absence in the guidelines guiding the engineers in these choices – the techne, if you will.

Maurits (10/7) asked us to confront Benjamin’s automaton in relation to these questions.

Helena (10/7) brought in the figure of the apprentice who poses questions for us around authorship, originality, techne, teaching, time and beauty.

Standing up for the 18th century – which others were less keen to do - Jane (10/7) reminded us of earlier struggles over the control of reproductions the printing press augured for both authors and artists.

Anu (10/7) described how Benjamin saw mechanical reproducibility as a process of liberating access. What happens to the author in contested spaces such as copyleft? And in the testimonial form?

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poesis combined with techne - in a “pre-existing biopolitcal field” that is deeply social, rather than an individuated process of pure originality. Technological authorship thus exceeds intellectual property, and allows us out of the usual opposites of piracy – that is, ownership. Rather, the opposite is an alternative form of property, like the commons. What would it mean to “’change the value of the currency’”, as Foucault’s Cynics propose, in relation to law and property?

Ross (10/7) asked about other kinds of payoffs to authorship, beyond ownership or claims to originality. What other desires - libidinal and emotional – might inform authorship, such as the desire for immortality? This returns us to the death question, and the relation of death to writing.

Might authorship, rather than warding off death, enable a passage to death? Conversely, plagiarism constitutes what might be considered the death of a career.

July 11: Visual Cultures and the Humanities (Paarl) Patricia Hayes & Phindi Mnyaka Returning us to some of the themes of the retreat’s filmic opening, Phindi revisited connections between aesthetics, crisis and loss in articulating a lesser-known Denfield photographic collection (the subject of her PhD) with a reading of Da Vinci’s The Last Supper, “an image that visited her in a dream”. The latter illustrates a, or the, “crisis of discipleship” in a key moment of Christ’s truth-telling as sage and teacher, in which Christ and his disciples’ rituals of teaching and healing – made through the disciplined work of following the master - come undone. But The Last Supper also demonstrates the harmony and technical precision involved in public violence and its representations. Here, Phindi worked through some lauded aspects of Da Vinci’s techne. In the hinterlands of Nigeria centuries later, Denfield’s representations relied on a different technological apparatus and set of expertise: that of the camera, and ‘modern’ medicine. As a member of the medical corps nursing colonial soldiers back to health, he began to build a repetitive photographic archive cataloguing ‘disappearing’ native life. Ritualistic photographic practice to stave off the cultural death of natives. This archival collection was filed according to established anthropological categories for studying the Other: ‘ritual’, ‘native housing’, ‘woman’. His intention was to produce beautiful images through the technical expertise of pictorial equilibrium, less than through rendering the native-subject-turned-object beautiful in herself.

Premesh (10/7) reminded us here of the limits of the critique of the Aluka digitization project, and the articulation between authorial enclosure, intellectual property and nationalism it revealed.

John (11/7) asked what a psychoanalytic view on The Last Supper, and her engagement with it, might enable, paying attention to the relationships between narcissism, empathy, dreams and death?

Phindi noted that Freud himself wrote an essay on Da Vinci.

Sanil (11/7) asked if we might call this a “technoaesthetics”?

An approach that gets us out of the symbolic, occularcentrist reading of art and perspective.

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For Denfield, truth resided in this beauty paired with expert documenting-collecting. A marriage of art and science, as in Da Vinci’s The Last Supper. But the picturesque cushions the truth of Nigeria, and later Basutoland, from Denfield: “the native can’t be saved from death”, like Da Vinci’s Christ and his disappearing mural.

Prompted discussion of the notion of ‘vanishing’ – vanishing points in perspective; vanishing indigenous culture arguments from Edward Curtis in the US (Naomi) to Duggan-Cronin in South Africa (Premesh). Elaborations were made on the relationship between vanishing, salvation, native death and civilisation. For example, Noeleen (11/7) pointed to the civilising technology of the Renaissance in da Vinci’s city Florence and the civilising technology of the camera in the space of the colony.

Responding to discussion within a reading group on photography and visual history, Patricia spoke to the “problems of the punctum”. The punctum has become a shorthand way of talking about photographs by viewers which has a kind of compacting or collapsing impression. She reacts here to this “claustrophobic” overuse and overemphasis – a “hypervocalisation”, an almost “compulsory” mobilisation of the punctum before any other tools of analysis. Posing the question, “what does the punctum enable and what does it disable”, she draws on four images and three texts (Barthes’ Camera Lucida, and Fried’s essay responding to Barthes, and Didi-Huberman’s reading of Vermeer). Re: Barthes’ distinction between the stadium and punctum, Patricia calls for more attention to the studium, sharing an example from Azoulay’s Civil Imagination which “talks the punctum, but walks the studium”. This brings us to questions of the intentional and unintentional in the production of the image.

What do new technologies – like digitisation and scale printing in the case of Hugo’s canny Messina/Musina, or “‘magical’” lens tilting or use of colour by Goldblatt in the Richtersveld – do in terms of the punctum? How do they render public what was supposed to be a private, unconscious, pricking; how do they force us to question the ‘truth-telling’ function/fiction of the photograph? In this shifting ground between techne, aesthetics and truth, what other vocabularies are available to us to read photographs with? In the “unstable terrain between affect and intellect, knowing and unknowing”, how might other tools open up the historical and optical unconscious in ways that the punctum’s overuse has failed us?

Jane (11/7) wondered about an “implicit conversation” about perspective taking place between Phindi and Patricia’s presentations: from Albertonian to Goldblatt(ian) manipulations, what do these do for democratising ways of seeing or creating a “state of vertigo”?

Gary (11/7) asked what a return to the composition of the image, its phenomenology, as an act – as called for

by Sartre - might enable, rather than approaching the image as a synthetic thing, already become.

Sanil (11/7) picked up on Patricia’s suggestion of Benjamin’s “aura” as a supplement to the punctum.

Paige (11/7) asked what thinking about the relationship between the punctum & punctuation might do.

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July 12: The Politics of Humanistic Inquiry (Paarl) Arunima G. & Maurits van Bever Donker Maurits started from the title of the session: dwelling on the possible opening of the ‘the’ or the ‘a’ politics of humanistic enquiry; the tensions between humanism in a historical sense or a new humanism inspired by Sartre and Fanon, Césaire and Biko; and a query over “inquiry” versus “critique”. He proposes a practice of reading as politics. In relation to the Foucault text, Maurits sees Biko’s I write what I like as making a move in the direction of Foucault’s parrhesia, but with more attention to the encounter. Maurits here wants to consider two trajectories with which to think the problem ‘man’. For help with the first – the Kantian trajectory – he turns to a counterarchive, first to Spivak and her grapplings with Kant and his critique of judgement, his concept of ‘man’, and the sublime, beyond simply a dismissal of Kant’s racism. He then engaged Ronald Judy’s Kant and the Negro, and Foucault’s Kant’s Anthropology. Fanon offers another trajectory to think “how this question of man works in our current moment”. One in which man is always becoming, but within a pre-constructed order of man, and through the “lived experience of blackness”.

Black and white are locked in place through the schematic ordering of language and desire, and tactile lived experience, with blackness relegated to a position of non-being, while whiteness is the potentiality of man. Césaire can nuance this trajectory, through an attention also to indigeneity, which offers a “spacing out of the world”, in a “geophilosophical” move inspired by Deleuze and Guattari. They argue, through Kant, that philosophy is about bringing thought in relation to the earth.

Sanil (12/7) reiterated that the problem of race in Kant is that the foreclosure of the racial Other is a casual one – why does Kant resort to this? It is not a mistake; could it be an “intentional mistake” of Kant’s?

For Sanil, this foreclosure is possible because the task of thinking the infinite has been abdicated to mathematics.

“Humanities need to get back to the question of thinking the infinite”.

Maurits is wary of the infinite’s attachment to Deity & morality. Can we think the infinite with phenomenology?

John (12/7) was interested to think the relationship between reading and grounding more. For Maurits, grounding can be taken in the sense of a foundation, a transcendental hierarchy that is organising the plane. But reading precisely is not transcendental – “there is an openness in reading to be touched, to be bruised perhaps.” Spivak speaks of reading as a “wager”, an unstable ground. What if we were to pursue “a constant openness as an act of reading?” Here, Premesh reminded us of the question in Biko’s trial: “’can’t you read?’”

To think about the kinds of sites of thinking politics and truthtelling, Arunima offered a reading of two texts: Butler’s Precarious Life against an essay by Sharmila Rege, one of the premier theorists of caste and Dalit feminism, on “Education as

Rege died of cancer the very next day, on July 13, 2013

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Trutiya Ratna: Towards Phule-Ambedkarite feminist pedagogical practice”. Rege poses an “unworking” of Butler’s text and the “bewildering” “return of the human” therein.

Written as it was in the post-9/11 moment, responding to an avowedly “American crisis”, Anu worries at the ‘we’ that Butler produces here. “What to do” with Butler’s injunction to mourn, to embrace a politics of grieving in the encounter with the Other, after violence, and as the route to the restoration of the human? What are the politics of mourning? What does a non-violent ethics mean in a context of everyday violence?

Anu turns to Rege, who is writing into the crisis of higher education in India, and how networks of caste exclusion operate formally and informally there. What about the human in relation to this? Here, Rege’s ‘stories from the classroom’ around caste, language and pedagogic encounters challenge the grounds of these conceptions of the human altogether. Is restoring the human, as Butler intones, such an easy task, and really achievable through mourning? Rather, Rege helps us ask what is the critical pedagogue’s role in this. Is it about listening (as witness, to narratives in testimonial form) or teaching in relation to the ‘unteachable’? “The task of teaching should be thought of as the act of listening as the ‘unteachable’ talk back to us.” Anu is interested in how we take pedagogy and the classroom as a site of politics more seriously.

John (12/7) also connected Maurits’ call to read with Anu’s injunction to listen. Wants to play around more with this listening/reading relationship.

Elliot (12/7) asked how we might think this space of the Winter school as a classroom, and a ground for politics in the way Anu suggests. “What have our seminars here produced in relation to a critical pedagogy?”

Ross (12/7) drew a longer trajectory on precariousness through Butler’s work to The Psychic Life of Power and asked what the connections might be between melancholia there and mourning here.

Naomi (12/7) turns to Wittgenstein to think about how the ‘we’ is produced through language and language ‘communities’. Anu noted how this returns us to discussions around the individual and the collective, the self and the community, and the tensions therein.

Ruchi (12/7) asked about the parallels between this figure and Foucault’s notion of pastoral power. What language and what ethics does Foucault offer us for this critical pedagogy?

Anu affirmed the importance of Foucault as a resource for Dalit and some women’s movements and how they think the political vis-à-vis disciplinary regimes.

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Second Stage of the Special Ministerial Committee’s Catalytic Project, “Hidden Voices in Art and Music”: December 2013 – June 2014

In the second stage of the project, we will convene an international workshop on the theme of ‘Arts of Intervention’ at the Klein Karoo Nasionale Kunstefees in Oudtshoorn in April 2014. The workshop will bring together 25 practitioners, artists and humanities scholars to launch a long‐term aesthetic exploration on the topic of African Critical Inquiry.

Emile Maurice will continue his work on developing the exhibition project titled, ‘Curating the Nation’. Mongi Mthombeni will continue his work with the youth of Masiphumelele and Barrydale. In addition, Mthombeni will be staging his reinterpretation of the play, Ubu and the Truth Commission, with the Handspring Puppet Company which is due to tour in Colombia, Brazil and possibly Argentina, after which it will return to South Africa for a season. Neo Muyanga will spend six months at the University of the Witwatersrand after having completed archival research at the UWC‐Robben Island Mayibuye Archives.

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