The central aim of the conference is to provide an opportunity to reflect on ways in which researchers from many different perspectives, writers, biographers, poets, artists, musicians and others have contributed to our knowledge and appreciation of both the book and the archive. It will focus on ways in which these multiple engagements with it, have placed it, and the scholarship around it, in the public domain. In so doing it also hopes to engage with other forms of archival research and publication, with the difficulties of understanding oral literature through writing and with the active curation of archives. In addition to keynote addresses, talks and panel discussions, there will be performances and exhibitions that commemorate the lives of those who created the archive, and celebrate the achievement of the publication of Specimens of Bushman folklore. The meetings will be held at the Hiddingh Hall campus of the University of Cape Town, close to Gray Street, where Wilhelm Bleek lived for a short while, and Queen Victoria Street, where both he and Lucy Lloyd worked at the South African Library. The nearby Iziko South African Museum was a favourite place for them to visit with their |xam teachers and the !kun boys to identify animals and plants that they spoke about in the 1870 and 1880s.
For other enquiries please contact Thomas Cartwright