Time to take stock

Work by ARC (Archive and Curation) MA students, Andrew Putter and George Mahashe, as well as an essay by APC's former post-doc, Kylie Thomas, was featured in Kronos: Southern African Histories, 38, a special issue on documentary photography

By Carolyn Hamilton

The current cycle of activities of the Archive and Public Culture Research Initiative ends this month. The 2012 year has been a busy and especially productive year with much primary research that was originally presented in research development workshops in 2009-11 now published, submitted for degrees or very close to completion.

The special focus on archives for the South African Historical Journal has been put to bed, and should appear in print early in the new year, featuring essays by APC research associates and students, Megan Greenwood, Grant McNulty, Susana Molins-Literas, Jill Weintroub, Hedley Twidle, Sara Byala and Carolyn Hamilton. This follows on the rather different special focus on archives that the APC convened last year for the methods journal, History in Africa, and which comprised essays by APC research associates Saarah Jappie, John Wright and Carolyn Hamilton, along with Shamil Jeppie.

The layout and design of our book, Uncertain Curature: In and Out of the Archive, edited by Carolyn Hamilton and Pippa Skotnes (and featuring essays by APC associates and students Fritha Langerman, Pippa Skotnes, David Cohen, Mbongiseni Buthelezi, Michael Nixon, Carolyn Hamilton and Nessa Leibhammer, Kylie Thomas, Marlene Winburg, Alex Dodd, Litheko Modisane, Carine Zaayman and Danny Herwitz) has been completed and we anticipate publication early in the new year.

Herwitz's own book (well-known to the APC in manuscript form as "live action heritage"), Heritage, Culture, and Politics in the Postcolony, was published this year by Columbia University Press.

Another publication highlight is the inclusion of work by two of our ARC (Archive and Curation) MA students, Andrew Putter and George Mahashe, along with an essay by APC's former post-doc, Kylie Thomas, in Kronos: Southern African Histories, 38, Special issue on Documentary Photography, which has just appeared. Both Andrew and George completed their courageous and innovative Masters projects (respectively Native Work: An impulse of tenderness and Dithugula tša Malefokane: Paying libation in the photographic archive made by anthropologists EJ and JD Krige in the 1930s in Bolobedu under Queen Modjadji the third).

The APC's focus on ancestor archives has gathered momentum as a result of Mahashe's interventions, further fuelled by the focus initiated on the Archival Platform website by Mbongiseni Buthelezi on Ancestral Stories (www.archivalplatform.org/ancestral_stories/) and by the latter's PhD thesis completed in 2012, 'Sifuna Umlando Wethu' (We are Looking for our History): Oral Poetry and the Meanings of the Past in Post-apartheid South Africa (Columbia University). 

Social Anthropology Honours student, Liam Keene, also completed his research project, Embodied Others: Conflict, Reconciliation and the Possession of Thokoza Sangomas in the Present, which explores the way in which contemporary Thokoza sangomas negotiate the legacies of the violent conflicts of the mfecane period. His research shows that the address of ancestors is central to the management not only of the apartheid past, but also to forms of reconciliation relating to devastating conflicts with a much deeper history.

APC research fellow, Simon Hall, and APC Chair, Carolyn Hamilton's collaborative work on a period of that deeper history resulted in the publication of three interlinked essays in the Journal of Southern African Studies this year.

ARC student Clare Butcher achieved a distinction for her MA submission, The Principles of Packing: A Case Study of Two Travelling Exhibition s from 1947-9, and a number of other theses are on the brink of submission.

In addition, individual researchers published a wide variety of articles and undertook numerous exhibitions. One of the explicit aims of the APC post-doctoral programme is to support graduates in their publication efforts and especially the publication of books where appropriate. Post-docs in particular benefit from the close attention that a variety of senior scholars within the APC group pay to their work. We are delighted that books by both of our previous post-docs have been accepted for publication, viz Kylie Thomas with Bucknell University Press, and Litheko Modisane with Palgrave Macmillan, the latter due out with a 2012 imprint. Current APC post-doctoral fellow, Dishon Kweya, is organising our 2013 book publication group, hopefully with similar prospects for success.

In the first phase of the APC (2009-2012), in partnership with the Centre for Curating the Archive, the Research Initiative's special focus area was on visual archival material. In 2012, we launched our new special focus area, sound archives and sound studies. This continues in 2013 under the able guidance of APC research fellow, Anette Hoffmann.

We have just heard that our proposal to the National Research Foundation for a multi-institutional collaboration, Five Hundred Years Rediscovered: The On-line Archive, has been successful. This project, which will run over the next three years, depends on a fusion of visual and sound methodologies and theories of the kind that we have invested in. A number of APC associates who have participated in these special focus areas will contribute to this new project.

In 2013, the project will undertake investigative work to prepare for the development of the archive. The project, which in the first instance focuses on the KwaZulu-Natal area, complements the book manuscript currently under development in the APC, Tribing and Untribing the Archive, and a linked exhibition to be curated by Nessa Leibhammer of the Johannesburg Art Gallery.  

Our extensive publication effort owes a great deal to the work of the APC's publications officer, Megan Greenwood, who left us in the middle of the year to teach English in China, where, she tells us in her most recent email, she is content, and, astonishingly, participating in Chinese karaoke!

In 2012, the APC said goodbye to our administrator, Marcelle Faure, who, fortunately, has only moved elsewhere on campus. Natasha Page has stepped into the breach in the interim. Colleen Petersen continues to watch carefully over everyone's research funds. 

The Archival Platform which the APC fosters, along with the Nelson Mandela Foundation, and which is hosted at UCT, continues to flourish. The Platform actively fosters critical discussion in the public domain of a wide range of archive-linked matters and its website plays a key role in information-sharing across the sector. Certain APC associates will want to pay close attention to the Platform's special report on the State of the Archive in South Africa which will be one of its 2013 foci.

In 2013, NRF Research Chair, Carolyn Hamilton, will be on sabbatical leave. There will be no new student admissions in this year and no regular research development workshops, other than those organised around the sound focus. If NRF Chair funding is renewed, the next cycle of activities will commence in 2014. In 2013, along with the Book Publication Group already mentioned, we will continue with the Summer Seminar Series, organised by post-doc, Glen Ncube, at which APC participants and others are invited to present their work in a relatively finished form.

The APC offices close on Friday, 14 December, 2012, and will reopen on Monday, 21 January, 2013. During the break, the Jon Berndt Thought Space will be accessible to all associates who have arranged to have keys to the room and whose UCT cards are coded for building access. Happy holidays, and to those who are planning to use this period to write, the APC wishes you a productive time.