Seminars

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

Please note the unusual time for this seminar.

Locating itself generally within the recent revival of traditionalism in South Africa and developments in colonial and imperial history, and particularly in work on the history of the eastern Cape and Natal in the nineteenth century, this paper examines some of the conclusions drawn about the ide

The paper concentrates on the spaces in which cross-cultural trade encounters happen and the negotiations involved in those meetings.

For much of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the image of baby-farming as an opportunistic and deceitful way to dispose of an unwanted child was a typecast that prevailed in many parts of the world.

New  immigrants  and  the  recently  urbanised  increasingly  co-occupy  estuarial  zones
loosely  structured  by  state  social  policy  and  hegemonic  cultural  norms.  In  these
zones,  hyperdiversity,  transience  and  transgressions  are  becoming  the  norm.  Amid

The fight against counterfeit medication has precipitated a shift from ‘drug safety’ to ‘drug security’. In examining that shift, this project inquires into the unfolding of a logic that aims at ‘securing’ health.

Political division within Afrikanerdom in the early 1980s hit the Broederbond as hard as it hit all other Afrikaner institutions.  The establishment of the Tricameral Parliament was a turning-point not only because it precipitated uprisings in the African townships, but also because the establish

In a world populated by so many acronyms, GFIP makes a good example of a ‘technical’ name given to a megaproject with potentially wide social effects that remained submerged for most of its life.