Seminars

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Testing Benedict Anderson’s thesis that nations are communities imagined principally
in the medium of the printed word, this chapter surveys a variety of writings on South
Africa from the decade between the South African War (1899-1902) and the moment

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This paper traces the history of four words central to the political vocabulary of the antiapartheid struggle: 'multi-racial,' "non-racial,' 'multi-racialism,' and 'non-racialism.' The opposition between 'non-racialism' and 'multi-racialism' was ab

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Writing on the city of Luanda, the capital of Angola, is not an easy task. Part of the difficulty stems from my aim to provide more than a descriptive account of the city. My primary intention in this book is to reflect on the spatial transformation of the city of Luanda over time.

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Although it is not surprising to find that the colonial archive is replete with pictures of Africans who were employed as policemen, soldiers and mercenaries, it is more surprising to find these types of photographs in private family albums or on sale as postcards.

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This essay highlights the politicization of kinship in the Bantu World and its women’s pages in the 1930s.

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Over a century ago Alfred Marshall, in his synthesis of the marginalist revolution, Principles of Economics (1890), defined economics as “both a study of wealth and a branch of the study of man”.

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In every British colony that received indentured workers from India, officials recorded personal and social details for identifying the arriving migrants. In the colony of Natal, just over 152,000 migrants were inscribed into such lists between 1860 and 1911.

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This  paper  consists  of  two  parts:  first,  a  historical  summary  of  a broader  project  being  pursued;  second,  a  specific  thread  of   involving  the development  of&nbs

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This paper examines how the Durban Bantu Child Welfare Society (DBCWS) came to be established as part of a wider context of burgeoning public activities by African women in Durban, particularly from the 1930s.

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This paper critically examines the relationship between theories of the public sphere and empirical research into consumption and consumer media.

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A study of the Independent Commission of Experts, popularly known as Bergier after its president, set up in Switzerland in the mid 1990s to establish, once and for all, the degree of complicity of the Swiss banks and authorities with the Nazi regime, has inspired me to return to South Africa’s Tr

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In this paper rather than adjudicate whether Wiehahn represented the first step down the road of reform or the last effort to shore up apartheid, I want to examine closely a specific fissure in South Africa’s industrial relations system considered in great detail by the Commission—that between th

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In the course of writing a book on Okhela (for there’s no such book, so far as I know), I came across many variations on this story, and what I have found particularly powerful is the way the assorted tellings and many truths have shaped the lives of both the storytellers and the subjects o

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[Please note that an earlier version of the attached pdf was corrupted.  The current file should display properly.]

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This introductory essay considers how we might forge a critical language to discuss an emerging constellation of cultural production in South Africa: that which focuses on the work of ‘intimate exposure’ in order to shape a public private sphere, which in turn forges forms of citizens

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In  researching  and  writing  change  in  three  cities  on  three  continents,  I  have confronted the question: what to make of ‘southern theory’ (Connell 2007) in relation to cities in the south as well as the north of th

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This paper is about the unsettling prospect of the millennium. In post-colonial Africa and in other locales, nationalists sought to organize culture as heritage, a set of behaviors and projects inherited, in a lineal fashion, from ancient forefathers.

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Lancaster House was great theater. All the suspense of negotiations, of who  would walk out and who would compromise, was not only anticipated but understood to be part  of the process.

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This chapter explores ways of understanding the kinds of transformations and ‘migrations’ that occur when a language moves to a new medium, in this case radio.  I set out what particular tensions and plays of power operate when this occurs in an era where colonial, imperial and, later, state powe

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