Duane Jethro at the Centre for Curating the Archive.

APC research associate Duane Jethro has returned to Cape Town to take up a research position with the Centre for Curating the Archive at UCT, where he will be working with colleagues on the conceptual and visual aesthetic potentialities of the University of Cape Town’s art collection for constituting publicness in contemporary Cape Town. We look forward to seeing this work in APC forums.

He arrives in Cape Town having completed a stint as a postdoctoral researcher in the research project “Making Differences: Transforming Museums and Heritage in the 21st Century”, Centre for Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage, CARMAH, at the Humboldt University Berlin. CARMAH was founded by Professor Sharon Macdonald, and is funded by her 5-year Alexander von Humboldt Professorship. At CARMAH, Duane worked on the contestation and negotiation of the German colonial past, particularly the inflections and resonances of decolonisation as category of critical, public engagement in the context of public debates about street names in Berlin. The intersections between religion and heritage are an enduring subject of his interest, and most recently he has been interpreting their conceptual connections and divergences in the debate about the Christian cross erected above the Humboldt Forum/Berlin City Palace. His book, Heritage Formation and the Senses in Post-Apartheid South Africa: Aesthetics of Power, was published in 2020 by Bloomsbury Academic.