Research workshop explores the 'affective turn'
Ann Cvetkovich and Christophe Rippe at the APC research workshop in May
IMAGE: MEGAN GREENWOOD
Imbued with the presence of visiting scholar Ann Cvetkovich, from the University of Texas at Austin, Archive & Public Culture's April workshop unfolded with a strong focus on archives of affect and the politics of public feeling. Cvetkovich has blazed a trail for scholarly writing that is unapologetically subjective and, following feminism's affective turn, for bringing personal narrative into scholarship that 'seeks reparation for the past in the affective dynamics of cultural memory' - over and above legal reform or state recognition.
Cvetkovich is the author of Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture and Victorian Sensationalism (Rutgers, 1992). In her latest book, Depression: A Public Feeling, due out with Duke Press later this year, she asks: 'What if depression, in the Americas at least, could be traced to histories of colonialism, genocide, slavery, exclusion, and everyday segregation and isolation that haunt all of our lives, rather than to biochemical imbalances?'
As Ellen C Garwood Centennial Professor of English and Professor of Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, she has also been coeditor, with Annamarie Jagose, of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies and her new writing projects are focused on the current state of LGBT archives and the creative use of them by artists. The day before the workshop, she led a well-attended open seminar, hosted by the new School of African and Gender Studies, Anthropology and Linguistics (AXL), on the Queer Art of the Counterarchive, in which she explored archive theory, LGBT archives and artists working with archives. The seminar welcomed the participation of Gabriel Khan and Nomancotsho Pakade from GALA (Gay and Lesbian Memory in Action).
The APC Workshop was delighted to showcase papers by Verne Harris, Sello Hatang and Shadrack Katuu, our activist and practitioner research associates from the Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory, as well as a presentation from Dr. Graeme Reid, director of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Rights Program for Human Rights Watch, NYC.
Another guest at the workshop was Christoph Rippe, a PhD candidate from the University of Leiden, who shared his research, which focuses on the socio-cultural biographies of a collection of missionary photographs from Mariannhill in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa.
While the APC research initiative probes the many circumstances in which archive stores the past and is mobilised in public life, it also pursues lines of critical enquiry within the University. Every webpage on the APC site is flagged with a quote from one of our APC research fellows, Professor Njabulo Ndebele: 'There can be no transformation of the curriculum, or indeed of knowledge itself, without an interrogation of archive.'
A cluster of papers at the workshop took up this challenge critically to engage inherited university practice. Joanne Bloch's In Mr Immelman's day: Towards a biography of the UCT Manuscripts and Archives Department and Jessica Brown's A History of the University of Cape Town's Permanent Works of Art Collection both explore the University's own archival practices. These papers emanate out of a UCT strategic focus driven by the APC initiative and the Centre for Curating the Archive, viz. ARC: the Visual University and Its Columbarium, (see www.arc.uct.ac.za), which responds to the contemporary imperative for universities to critically examine the archives of their knowledge systems in order to open up routes to new, or refigured, bodies of evidence and new forms of knowledge.
ARC couples critical enquiry into inherited archives with innovative visual methodologies of work in relation to archive. Installations by both Bloch and Brown on their respective topics were featured in the April 2012 exhibition, Imperfect Librarian, by the Fine Art student members of the APC. It developed further the discussion of the role of bibliography inaugurated earlier in Fritha Langerman's paper, Cover to cover: the contribution of the printed book to the reproduction of linear, hierarchical models of natural history.
Other papers at the workshop which reflected in relevant ways on academic practice included APC's 2009 Research Fellow John Higgins' Making the Case for the Humanities in South Africa and an offering from John Wright and Simon Hall, Tuning up for OBO: 'Southern Africa to 1850'. This paper stimulated a vital discussion of the way in which research tools like the Oxford On-line Bibliography establish a canon of definitive texts in a particular field.
The turn toward the subjective and self-reflexive triggered an array of papers that featured adventurous textual strategies which also resonated in Langerman's discussion of the form of text. In his creative engagement with Ivan Vladislavić's The Loss Library (2011), as well as early stories republished in 2010 as Flashback Hotel, Hedley Twidle traced how 'Vladislavić's investment in an experimental, anti-realist poetics underlies the documentary texture of even his ostensibly non-fictional texts'. Paying attention to the idiosyncratic and complex imaginative architectures that generate Vladislavić's prose, Twidle's reading explored 'how these avowedly writerly works remain open to a contemporary African metropolis, even while enamoured of anachronisms, second-hand bookshops and outdated libraries'.
On a related note, Alexandra Dodd used endnotes to explore some unapologetically subjective responses to her forthcoming review of Dobrota Pucherová's The Ethics of Dissident Desire in Southern African Writing in the interests of critiquing the form of the book review itself. She traced the book's resonance within her own life 'by means of a chronology of responses, which evidences a semi-public sphere of reception that is simultaneously intimate and public'.
In his paper David William Cohen opened up discussions around the concepts of the everyday and the ordinary and brought discordant stories within a 'single' narrative. 'In a scholarly economy where attentions orient to an area of the world, or a period, or a theme, or a specific set of methods, I am trying to find some usefulness in jarring dissonance, juxtaposition, especially through the constitution of a point-of-perspective of a train viewed momentarily passing in the distance - through the frame of a window in a segment of a film,' he wrote.
Other papers initiated questions around the politics of authorship in texts that narrate the past and perplexing ethical ambiguities in our retrospective understandings of the historical figures who were responsible for the production or assembly of key archival texts the colonial context. In this regard, figures like the filmmaker, Donald Swanson, and the photographer, Arthur Duggan-Cronin, came under the spotlight in Jacqueline Maingard and Andrew Putter's papers, respectively.
Discussions that accompanied various overlapping presentations over the course of the workshop raised certain critical questions, not only around the archives and objects with which we interact, but also in relation to scholars' positioning. As go-betweens or mediators between object and audience, how do scholars position themselves as 'masters' or 'subjects' of the two spaces? What is the position of the scholar in the genealogy of archives and imaginers? What about the complex conceptual and methodological terms scholars use such as 'curate', 'public feelings', 'public art' and 'biography'.
This APC workshop also welcomed a number of newly appointed APC affiliates, including APC post-doctoral researcher Glen Ncube and APC Honorary Research Fellow Vibeke Viestad. Ncube, who recently completed his PhD exploring the tensions between biomedical innovation and the broader colonial ambitions of colonial healthcare in the delivery of rural healthcare, presented on his current preoccupation with the complex nature of 'the patient archive'. Hailing from the University of Oslo, Norway, Viestad presented her PhD researchon the material culture of dress and personal ornamentations of the San of colonial Southern Africa.
The workshop also marked the APC initiative's entry into the sound archive, spearheaded by newcomers Anette Hoffman and Phillip Miller. While Hoffman shared with the workshop participant sounds from recordings by missionary Franz Mayr in Pietermartizburg in 1908, Miller transported participants to otherworldly places with sound art and musical archives of breath and song.
Another feature of the workshop was the exposure to research projects by emerging Honours scholar Liam Keene and 3rd-year international exchange student Clark Bledsoe. Keene will shortly be entering a period of intensive research into Thokoza sangomas' negotiation of historical conflict in spirit possession, while Bledsoe is immersed in understanding the curatorial practice of the South African National Gallery.
Although located in different disciplinary genres, the papers seemed to grapple with certain cross-cutting issues, including the question of the 'multiple' temporalities and locations of archival or art collections or ideas, spurred by physical and ideational travel, as well as 'travel' to exotic spatial locations, aided by technology. For instance, Clare Butcher's idea of 'travelling exhibitions'; visual or virtual repatriation of materials; or Graeme Reid's meditations on photographs shot in East Africa featuring Parisian backgrounds as a result of the magic of Photoshop. This indicated a need for constant adjustment of our analytical lenses in order to keep in touch with the changing frames of public culture.
The workshop ended on a high note the following Sunday morning, when, as a postscript, a group of workshop participants climbed to the summit of Devil's Peak to clear their heads and refresh their perspective for a new session of intensive research before we meet up again in July.