History 711: History after apartheid: Critical concepts in historiography (Honours core course)

Course Convenor – Dr. Riedwaan Moosage  

Since 1994 and the democratic transition in South Africa, there has been a steadily increasing demand for new narratives of South African pasts as the basis of an emergent nation ‘after’ apartheid. The demand has been spurred on by the need to counter the adverse effects of apartheid on the social consciousness of South Africans. Over the past few years, this demand has grown ever more urgent. It has been expressed variously through academic and public discourse, where history has become important for all sorts of debates around identity, culture, and memory. This has increasingly seen debates around heritage, commemoration, and restitution, with its accompanying processes and practices come to the fore. However, these demands, and desires has often relied on the very foundational categories of nation, class, experience, race and gender - categories that were noted as problematic well before 1994 and that mark how we think about the past in the present.

In this Honours core course, we seek to understand these categories, with its accompanying historiographies and methodologies, to consider new approaches in re-thinking histories ‘after’ apartheid. This includes re-examining and re-imagining critical concepts for the study of the past and beyond history, such as archive, evidence, voice, race, class, gender, nation and violence through approaches such as social history, public history and postcolonial history. In doing so, we pose critical questions of the relations between the rigours of disciplinary history, the various iterations of its dissemination, and the numerous publics it may speak to, or against. Through a series of seminars and workshops, the overall aim of this course is to sustain your critical thinking towards the development and arrival of your research question. Your research question will be articulated through the submission of a structured Honours Research Proposal.

History 844: Key Issues in History: Medium, Concept, Practice (MA core course)

As a sensory choreography in space, curating is a complex practice that leans on visual and sonic, as well as tactile, olfactory, and gustatory experiences to invite, guide, direct, and nudge audiences to move, pause, linger, engage, experience, learn and return to spaces delineated by location, architecture, and exhibition design. A semester-long course taught over two terms, Curatorship is an opportunity to critically engage the methodological questions that underpin ideas of curating, as well as experiment with conceptual questions that trouble the field’s knowledge making in the present. The first term focuses on a series of methodological questions related to the curatorial: What constitutes a ‘curatorial’ approach? Where is the complexity in curatorial storytelling? Can an exhibition make an argument? How can we reach more widely into theory to innovate new approaches to curating? What constitutes an embodied curatorial practice? How does curating figure as a practice of listening? How is curating a situated practice? What constitutes an exhibition history? How can the debates generated by exhibitions be tracked, recorded, and engaged in meaningful ways? What is the role of institutional critique, new institutionalism, and curatorial activism in exhibition making? What is the relationship between curating and education? And then the second term introduces a conceptual focus designed to invite experimental approaches to thinking about curating. By looking closely at what is outside – ‘out’ and to the ‘side’ –conventional curatorial practice, this focus is an opportunity to re-visit, review, and reimagine the value of conventions and practices, including the limits of the gallery and museum space, the place of argument in thematic and historical exhibitions, the opportunities and compromises in large-scale exhibitions, working with archives and ephemera, and curating as an expanded practice (into notions such as thinking curatorially, reading curatorially, remembering curatorially).
 

History 732 and 832: Political Biography and the National Liberation Struggle in South Africa  

Course Convenor: Prof. Maurits van Bever Donker

This course will explore different itineraries of what has been called "radical black thought" in the 20th Century. It plays with the idea of biography and its politics, to ask how theories, ideas, concepts might work and be set to work in the writing of possible lives. As Rassool argues, political biography is both a deeply contested genre and deeply implicated in the making of a national "memorial complex" whose temporal horizon is the past. Abiding by Rassool's critique, if differently, this course will take the question of biography and pose it as one for the future, rather than a reflection on the past. In particular, the course will examine the ways in which a concept like difference has been textured, shaping the terrain on which the future may be thought. The course argues that this has been a critical aspect of what we refer to as movements of liberation, in South Africa and globally. Students can expect to engage in the writings of figures associated with the Negritude and Black Consciousness movements, especially as these ask after the concepts of the human and difference, as well as the differing ways these questions have been thought historically, politically, and philosophically. 

History 735 and 835: Visual History 

Course Convenor – Prof. Patricia Hayes

This postgraduate module course may be taken by students registered for Honours and MA degree programmes and can also be audited by doctoral students. It offers students the opportunity to become skilled in both the historical and cultural analysis of images, and their production. The module has always put emphasis on photography and its complicated ethical relationship with African history, and now also poses questions about visuality and the Anthropocene.

There are two sides to the course: one theoretical and the other practical. Practical sections of the module are taught by photojournalist Eric Miller.

Theory: The ten theory classes cover a range of topics, including critiques of the master narratives of the invention of photography in the 19th century and the dissemination of the medium around the globe alongside the forces of imperialism and capitalism. Colonial uses of photography on the continent are explored, especially the ways photography is both a product of resource exploitation and a medium for representing these and other issues. The course engages with the ways African subjects have taken up the medium, from early studio practices to radical photojournalism, documentary and art, up to the digital dissidence and environmental agitation of the present day in social media. The course also takes up important debates about vision and violence, civil engagement, the Anthropocene, and the need for new histories of light and geologies of media in Africa.

Practical photography: A series of eight practical workshops accompanies the theory class, promoting visual literacy and imparting the necessary skills for all-round competence in both analogue and digital photography. The module also provides training in Photoshop and related software for storage, metadata and archiving.  Students are taught the basics of the DSLR camera, and conduct their own assignments in portraiture, movement, still life, landscape and street life.

Between 2016-19, assignments and projects have been undertaken within a specific area of Cape Town, the historic Voortrekker Road, resulting in several exhibitions. In 2020, Covid-19 restrictions have produced more intimate, interior and meditative work by students.  Student Exhibitions include: Voortrekker Gateways, 2016; New Jerusalem, 2017; When we left the world, 2020. From 2022 onwards, students are encouraged to explore the scientific workings of photography alongside ecological issues. 
 

History 748 and 848: The History of Southern African Anthropology: The Archive and the Field

Course Convenor :  Prof. Andrew Bank     
                                          
This is a course about working in archives and how one can go about moving from documents in archives to writing UWC M.A. theses. It assumes that the work of historian will take place primarily in an archive and it begins by contrasting the traditional methods of the historian and anthropology in the fields of African anthropology and African studies. We look at how these two ‘disciplines’ have, for the most part, developed different and distinctive methods in relation to ‘data gathering’. Historians typically work in archives dealing with documents in special collections in university libraries. Social anthropologists have typically done ‘fieldwork’, traditionally, based on the methods of ‘participation observation’, initially in areas that were relatively remote (‘primitive’ in the discourse of the discipline). So given this dual focus on archive and field, we begin the course by looking at how these concepts have been used in African studies, and at how their use has changed in recent decades as the world of knowledge has become more electronic (in relation to archives) and as anthropologists have adopted many different kinds of field strategies. What is an archive? What is ‘the field’? What is the relationship between “archive” and “field” in that sub-discipline of anthropology, the history of anthropology, as it developed from the 1970s? How was “the field” conceived when social anthropology was established as a modern discipline in Britain and South Africa (and the United States) from the 1920s? How did this traditional concept of “the field” in anthropology change during the 1980s and 1990s as the world became more spatially interconnected?

We will then engage with the contested politics of African anthropology and African studies as research fields today. So here we examine postcolonial Africanist critiques of these fields of study, usually written by political scientists and sociologists. In African anthropology, how did European scholars conceive of their subjects/objects of study? How did this framework of ‘primitivism’ limit the discipline as it emerged from the 1920s onwards? In relation to African Studies and we look particularly at African Studies in the United Kingdom, how did the geopolitics of US and UK area studies impact on its development? What was the connection between colonial research institutes in Africa (the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute in Northern Rhodesia created in 1938 and the East African Research Institute in Uganda created in 1948) and the development of African studies? What was the power politics involved in the relationship between white researchers and Africans? Who benefitted from their research?

To varying degrees, the work in most of the case studies that follow in the second section of the course may be read, in part at least, as responses to these critiques. In this section we will explore how former UWC graduate students who have taken this course and written M.A. theses in the field of the history of anthropology in southern Africa have worked on different archival collections either physical or virtual. These students will explain to you how they worked in practical terms on given archival collections in order to work towards writing an M.A. thesis or mini-thesis in the field of the history of anthropology in Africa. From this you will learn that there are three stages involved in this process. First, how did they identify and access collections of materials? (In one case by means of a private donation from a relative.) Second, for how long and how did they work on them? What strategies of interpretation did they develop over time as they read and reread these archival materials? Thirdly, how did they go about working with these archival up into arguments of thesis chapters (narratives), located in relation to what other scholars had written on those topics?

The case studies are meant to demonstrate to you the research methods and strategies adopted by successful students, all but one predecessors on this course (and all of whom have been awarded distinctions for their theses). In the third and final section of the course, we will initiate you in practical terms how scholars in African anthropology have gone about working with archival materials – mainly field-notes but also field letters and photographs. Again we will explore how archive data became scholarly argument, here in the forms of articles and book chapters rather than chapters of thesis.

History 749 and 849: Activism and Archives: Struggles in and over collections and history

Course Convenor: Dr. Koni Benson

This course explores debates over movement archives of the past and present, and provides participants the opportunity to creatively engage with an archive/collection of their choice. In recent years there has been a proliferation of anti-colonial/liberation struggle archives and a growing interest in the documentation of protest in the past and present. At the same time there has been a heated debate on the politics of narration, curation, and authorship, and harsh critiques of many of the assumptions and practices underlying conventional public and social history approaches to resistance struggle histories. This course aims to put the content and the creation of these archives and collections into historical context, and into conversation with ongoing struggles in and over these histories. 

The course introduces students to some of the debates about producing histories of liberation struggles. It includes debates on how archives and collections are constituted, curated, and mobilised in political struggle, and about the role of historians, artists, curators and cultural workers in engaging and representing struggles in the past, present, and future.  It is therefore relevant to students interested in the politics and production of protest histories; new approaches to social and public history; archival studies; and curatorship, museum, and liberation heritage practices.

Core seminar topics include: liberation archives and collections; approaches to histories of resistance; records, recordings, artefacts and representations of history; case studies and debates on anti-colonial archiving and collecting projects; living archives and struggle history narratives; historians and struggle histories; artists as historians; activists as archives; collaborative approaches to historical production; and critical and creative approaches to activist archives.

We have been enthusiastically welcomed to engage with the materials and approaches of numerous collections/archives such as UWC-Robben Island Mayibuye Archives and the UWC Art and Artefact Collections, collections at District Six Museum, and various newly consolidated and growing online archive platforms such as the Revolutionary Papers Project and the Freedom Archives, and the plethora of living memory and private collections of documentation and material culture of various movements of the past and present that are rapidly becoming available.  

The course goes beyond theory and facilitates student experiments with creative, critical, and collective approaches to creating, curating, and engaging activist archives. Students will design their own final projects, which can be in the form of a paper, or can be a creative production accompanied by a shorter reflective essay and bibliography. 

History 750: Museums, Heritage and Public History (Honours only)

Course Convenor:  Ms. Robyn Humphreys

The course engages debates about heritage as a form of production. Museums, memorials and exhibitions are analysed as different heritage genres and as sites of contestation and critical practice. There is a strong focus on the histories and operations of the institution of the museum in Africa. Local examples, such as the District Six, Robben Island and Lwandle Migrant Labour museums are drawn upon in order to examine the poetics of exhibiting cultures, objects and their meanings, museum transformation and the emergence of community museums. It includes seminars on: national heritage, community museums and museums and the ethics of collections. On completion of this module students should be able to: demonstrate an understanding of various debates about heritage as a product and not an inheritance; analyse how sites, museums, memorials, exhibitions, orality and cultural practices operate as different heritage genres and as productions of history in the public; evaluate critical debates in the creation and workings of museums; understand how museums and heritage can be understood as sites of critical practice.

History 846: Advanced Issues in Museum and Heritage Studies (Masters only)

Course Convener: Prof. Rory Bester

How does history, literally and figuratively, nourish us?

A growing interest in food and food culture often emphasises the relationships between people, ingredients, preparation, and the meaning of a dish or meal within a region, tradition, culture and/or heritage. Less attention is given to the kitchen as a space that enables and holds these rituals and relationships, not only in the present but also in the way they are connected to the past. While the kitchen might appear to have a benign history, and is all too often situated at the invisible and anecdotal margins of what are often more visible, androcentric and hypermasculine (his)story writing, it is nonetheless a space deeply intersected by histories of slavery, colonialism, nationalism, migration, diaspora, race, gender and aesthetics. The kitchen offers especially spatial, choreographic and sensory complexities for understanding these historical intersections in the present. The kitchen has complex, multiple, and often contradictory lives. Some of these many kitchen lives include colonial, slave and apartheid kitchens; nomadic, migrant and diasporic kitchens; queer, gendered and feminist kitchens; and funeral and fairy tale kitchens. They can be spaces of nourishment, resilience, safety, sharing and wisdom. But also just as easily spaces of harassment, judgement, prejudice, oppression, and othering. Whether permanent or temporary, different kitchen lives oftentimes compete with and contradict one another, and require sustained critical engagement. As such, this course is a series of overlapping and overlaid conversations about the ways in which the ‘kitchen’ – as spatial, choreographic, conceptual, curatorial, poetic, sensory and symbolic forms – holds community, traditions, heritage, archives and memory. It asks the following three questions about how the past is nourished in the present: (a) How do we ‘curate’ different kinds of remembering in public, in the form of history, heritage, memorials (and memorialisation), memory, and museums? (b) How does the kitchen enable different kinds of remembering in public? And (c) how do we understand the kitchen as a curation of tangible (utensils, tools, cookbooks) and intangible (cooking, meals, conversations) remembering?

History 751 and 851: Curatorship

Course convenor : Prof. Rory Bester

As a sensory choreography in space, curating is a complex practice that leans on visual and sonic, as well as tactile, olfactory, and gustatory experiences to invite, guide, direct, and nudge audiences to move, pause, linger, engage, experience, learn and return to spaces delineated by location, architecture, and exhibition design. A semester-long course taught over two terms, Curatorship is an opportunity to critically engage the methodological questions that underpin ideas of curating, as well as experiment with conceptual questions that trouble the field’s knowledge making in the present. The first term focuses on a series of methodological questions related to the curatorial: What constitutes a ‘curatorial’ approach? Where is the complexity in curatorial storytelling? Can an exhibition make an argument? How can we reach more widely into theory to innovate new approaches to curating? What constitutes an embodied curatorial practice? How does curating figure as a practice of listening? How is curating a situated practice? What constitutes an exhibition history? How can the debates generated by exhibitions be tracked, recorded, and engaged in meaningful ways? What is the role of institutional critique, new institutionalism, and curatorial activism in exhibition making? What is the relationship between curating and education? And then the second term introduces a conceptual focus designed to invite experimental approaches to thinking about curating. By looking closely at what is outside – ‘out’ and to the ‘side’ –conventional curatorial practice, this focus is an opportunity to re-visit, review, and reimagine the value of conventions and practices, including the limits of the gallery and museum space, the place of argument in thematic and historical exhibitions, the opportunities and compromises in large-scale exhibitions, working with archives and ephemera, and curating as an expanded practice (into notions such as thinking curatorially, reading curatorially, remembering curatorially).

History 752 and 852: Forensic History 

Course Convenors: Dr. Riedwaan Moosage, Dr. Bianca van Laun, Prof. Nicky Rousseau

The ‘forensic turn’ has captivated scholarly and public attention and imagination as is evidenced by a burgeoning scholarly literature and explosion of novels, television series, documentaries and other forms of cultural expression. Within this there has been a profound critical rethinking of the forensic through several disciplinary frames: archaeology, anthropology, literature and architecture.  Most of this work – and most especially as represented in popular TV series (CSI, Bones, etc) – understands forensic as the application of forensic science in order to solve and produce evidence in criminal cases. In this course, however, we follow a more critical understanding of forensic, which both returns us to its etymological roots as forensis and proposes a counter-forensics more aligned to questions of justice associated with contexts of genocide, mass violence, corruption and environmental depredation.  We also understand justice to encompass not just legal justice but social and political justice too.

The course comprises twelve seminars and one workshop dispersed through four blocks of three seminars each. It poses questions that relate to the ways in which the forensic, understood through forensis, mediates our understanding of the evidentiary nature of differing economies of violence and the ways in which differing categories of missing persons are constituted. By the end of the course you should be able to understand the distinction between forensic as normatively understood and forensis. You will also feel confidently familiar with key critical debates and issues concerning the theory, the history and practice of forensics/forensis.  You should be able to interpret forensic documents, evaluate forensic evidence and present evidential arguments.
 

History 753 and 853: Theories and Practices of Oral History (not offered in 2024)

Oral History is a crucial component of historical research. The course builds on issues of memory and history introduced at third year and engages debates and critiques of oral history, opens up broader and more theoretical understandings of orality and memory, and explores newer methodologies for doing oral history. We explore theories of orality; the practice and ethics of oral history; memory, testimony, and nation; orature and performance; feminist approaches to oral histories; transcription, translation, collaboration, and curation.

Through seminars and hands on workshops, we conduct and analyse oral history interviews, engage ethical debates of doing and using oral history in both research and in the public sphere, and grapple with issues of power dynamics and knowledge production. By the end of this course, we hope we will all be better equipped to: compare the debates concerning the theory and practice of oral history;  at honours level, conduct oral history interviews, and at Master’s level then design and carry out oral history research projects, informed by collaborative and experimental methodologies; creatively engage the transcription, translation and writing of oral history; understand the politics of knowledge production in the public sphere; at honours level, develop an ethical awareness of issues related to doing and using oral history in research, and at Master’s level, obtain ethical clearance.

History 754 and 854: Experimental History Writing

Course Conveners: Prof. Paolo Israel and Dr. Phindi Mnyaka

This course seeks to establish a space in which to explore and practice formal experimentation in historical writing. It takes cue from scholars who produce works at the intersections of genres and disciplines and aims to respond to concerns about the normativity of academic writing that have emerged in the context of debates around the decolonization of the university and its curriculum.

While the question of historical writing has been at the core of the reflections that emerged in the wake of Hayden White’s Metahistory, actual writing experiments in the discipline of history have been few and far between, often carried out at the fringes of the academic guild. In two influential essays White himself (1966, 1996) made stock of the poverty of historical writing when compared to the modernist novel’s formal disruptions. In spite of such interventions, the writing of academic history has largely remained wedded to scaffolding, summaries, sobriety, neutrality, verticality, and third person omniscience. The epistemological crisis fueled by French theory from the 1980s onwards scarcely promoted formal innovation; rather, it led to the emergence of a new theoretically-inflected jargon, more critical perhaps, but not less prescriptive than the positivist prose it superseded. In the first decade of the 21st century, formal experimentation has been increasingly championed by scholars who produce works at the intersections of genres and disciplines. Concerns about the normativity of academic writing have also emerged in the context of the debates around the decolonisation of the university and its curriculum. Are the prose of history and theory inherently bound to the authoritarianism of the “single mind” (Scott 2017)?
This course seeks to establish a space in which to explore and practice formal experimentation in historical writing. Its main objectives are to enable the students to acquire an increased consciousness of genre and form, and to lead them to explore alternative forms of writing, which might draw from existing skills not sufficiently recognised by formal academic learning. The course is composed of a reading and writing component. The first will focus on both conceptual texts on historical writing and examples of experimental writing in various genres and forms, with the objective of achieving a close understanding of the workings of form and its potential. The practical component will consist of workshops in which the students will be led to enrich their writing skills beyond the prescriptive formats of academic writing, and to inject an experimental quality in their theses.