What do we do with the relics of race science in South Africa? My research focuses on the Bushman lifecasts currently housed in Iziko Museum in Cape Town. Dozens of casts were made in the first half of the 20th Century with the aim of classifying different races, specifically Bushmen.
In this paper I want to examine the reasons for the impressively consistent disinterest in African economics that runs through the four styles of comparative political economy that the journal Economy & Society – the most important forum for comparative economic sociology – has pu
Nostalgia has become an apt concept to elicit the examination of traces of the past upon the present. In this presentation, I am concerned with a particular kind of nostalgia, or, what I call, here, urban nostalgia.
Cape Town boasts roughly two dozen sacred Muslim tombs, known as kramats, which mark the resting places of pious, 17th and 18th century exiles from around the Indian Ocean basin.
In this paper, which draws from a book manuscript in progress on feminist/queer politics in India, I show how ‘activism’ is informed by multiple rationalities and techniques of governing the self and other.
South Africa’s legal system forms part of the lifeline of its democratic dispensation and is the foundation upon which it depends. It is crucial for social demands for service delivery, ensuring protection and general relief from the state for civil society.
This paper examines the various types of experimentation that are built into the practice of oncology within Rwanda’s developing national infrastructure, with a focus on historicizing malignancy there by examining trajectories of research and treatment from the early 20th century until the
It is well-established in the South African historiography that the apartheid government adopted a new “language of legitimation” (Posel, 1984) in the aftermath of the 1976 student uprisings.
Partial or complete absence of the melanin pigment in the skin, eyes, and hair shape varied cultural expressions and labels denoting albinos or persons with albinism (PWA).
Nations, as Isabel Hofmeyr long ago observed, are forged, in part, from words. Many, perhaps most, of those words are in the nature of history, stories of the past that provide explanation, justification, a charter for present arrangements. What are the politics of this process?
This paper examines the recent history of population registration and credit surveillance in Kenya. It argues that the events taking place there are important because they mark out the development of new kinds of administratively created informational collateral which, for the first time, m
There has been increasing interest (particularly on online forums) on the apparent underrepresentation of African-based scholars in economics scholarship on Africa.
In his 2014 book Askari: A Story of Collaboration and Betrayal in the Anti-Apartheid Struggle historian Jacob Dlamini considers why collaborator Glory Sedibe turned from being a commander in the ANC’s military arm to working with fervour for the apartheid Security Branch.
This paper is a work in progress. Key references, including quotations, are missing. Please do not circulate. The remarks I am about to make are shaped in no small part - but not exclusively - by the turmoil in South African academy over the last two years.
The isiZulu word ‘isithunguthu’ (pl. izithunguthu) is today hardly known outside a small circle of scholars. It does not appear in modern isiZulu dictionaries, nor is it known to isiZulu-speaking academics whom we have consulted. There is no entry for it in A.T.
This paper considers the history of an experiment in architectural education that took place at what is today the University of Nairobi, between 1965 – 1967.
For the period that we might loosely call "late pre-industrial" in both Southern Africa and North America: What was the relationship between colonialism and profound indigenous developments--new social formations, family arrangements, scales of war, relationships with the environment, a
