HUMA Book Launch

Author: Duane Jethro (Department of African Studies and Linguistics, University of Cape Town) 

Introduction: In this book, Duane Jethro creates a framework for understanding the role of the senses in processes of heritage formation. He shows how the senses were important for crafting and successfully deploying new, nation-building heritage projects in South Africa during the postapartheid period. The book also highlights how heritage dynamics are entangled in evocative, changing sensory worlds.Jethro uses five case studies that correlate with the five main Western senses. Examples include touch and the ruination of a series of art memorials; how vision was mobilised to assert the authority of the state-sponsored Freedom Park project in Pretoria; how smell memories of apartheid-era social life in Cape Town informed contemporary struggles for belonging after forced removal; how taste informed debates about the attempted rebranding of Heritage Day as barbecue day; and how the sound of the vuvuzela, popularized during the FIFA 2010 Football World Cup, helped legitimize its unofficial African and South African heritage status.This book makes a valuable contribution to the field of sensory studies and, with its focus on aesthetics and material culture, is in sync with the broader material turn in the humanities.

See the book: Heritage Formation and the Senses in Post-Apartheid South Africa

About the author: Duane Jethro is a Lecturer in the Department of African Studies and Linguistics at the University of Cape Town. He specialises in the analysis of the cultural construction of heritage and contested public cultures. A graduate of Utrecht University, he was Junior Research Fellow at the Centre for Curating the Archive, at the University of Cape Town between 2020 and 2022, and pursued a research project takes a multiperspectival approach to the loss and salvage of the University of Cape Town Jagger Library and its collections after a devastating fire in April 2021. He was co-curator (with Michaelis Galleries curator Jade Nair) of the Jagger Library Memorial Exhibition in April 2022, and co-organised a symposium, After the Fire: loss, archive and African Studies with Archive and Public Culture Research Initiative postdoctoral research fellow Alirio Karina.

Discussant: Dr Ala Alhourani, Department for the Study of Religions, University of Cape Town

Dr Ala Alhourani is a lecturer in the Department for the Study of Religions at the University of Cape Town. He holds a PhD in Anthropology from the University of the Western Cape. His publications focused on the performances of Islam in Cape Town and Muslim identity politics of

Convenor: Amina Alaoui Soulimani 

More about the HUMA Book Lunch Series

Lunch will be served at 12:30 SAST (GMT+2).

Register to attend: send us an email at huma@uct.ac.za

Attending online? Register to join via Zoom: 

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