Symposium at the University of Cape Town

A collaboration of the Archive and Public Culture Research Initiative, the Centre for Curating the Archive (CCA) and HUMA, the Institute for Humanities in Africa

This symposium marks the first anniversary of the fire that destroyed the Jagger Reading Room and much of the African Studies collections at the University of Cape Town. This was not the only African archive or institution to burn in 2021. We take these moments of destruction as a starting point for reconsidering African Studies and the nature of archives today. These fires underscore how – rather than simply being sites of accumulation, classification and retrieval – archives are shaped by loss. First marked by absences – by losses that precede and coincide with their establishment – archives are spaces of struggle against inevitable deterioration and decay that demand ever more complex and costly practices of conservation. They are also spaces often at risk of or fragmented by deliberate ruination. Following this, we ask what it means to treat loss as a fundamental condition of the archive and draw on that assumption as a new entry point into a consideration of the relationship between archives and African Studies. What does it mean to think about an archive deemed African Studies as a space always already marked, and made possible, by loss? And what new genealogies of and for African Studies does loss enable us to think?