Decolonisation and the Archive: Languages and Method in the Digital Era | 16-17 Aug | 12noon - 3:30

WiSER warmly invites you to an in-person symposium

Decolonisation and the Archive: Languages and Method in the Digital Era
WiSER Seminar room | 16–17 August 2023 | 12noon-3:30

If the archive and the colonial library have long been deconstructed by, among others, Jacques Derrida, V. Y. Mudimbe and Ann Laura Stoler, there remains the niggling question of how archives can be enduringly constructed. The argument that archives are historically constituted, incomplete and expressive of power relations is indisputable, yet it does not follow that the project of epistemic decolonisation can dispense with the archive as such. On the contrary, a major stumbling block in the endeavour to create decolonised institutions of knowledge across the global South has been the precarious economic and material conditions of what might be called the custodianship of the past. In the meantime, the benign threat from well-endowed institutions in the West to care for – and take over – entire bodies of archival material remains constant.

Archives, of course, are not just physical collections and libraries. They are equally a matter of how discourse is framed, of what is regarded as belonging and not belonging to the sphere of possible and authoritative knowledge. Africanists have in this context pioneered “oral history” as an alternative archival resource. And even as the digital era reproduces and reinforces aspects of global inequalities, there is an evolving potential in current technologies that global South scholars are making use of and remain to be developed further. One such opening concerns language, or rather the multiplicity of languaging, that remains under-theorised in archival practices. Another relates to alternative textual genres and ephemera, as addressed by Ashleigh Harris, among others.

Against this backdrop, then, it is the intention of this symposium to consider the archive beyond critique. If it is the case that the epistemic relationship with the past is in constant need of renegotiation – and nowhere more urgently so than in contexts of decolonisation – then what can scholars with global South affiliations contribute, in the current moment, to reinventing the archive?

Programme

Wednesday August 16

12noon Lunch at WiSER
12:30  Opening Remarks : Hlonipha Mokoena, Stefan Helgesson, Keith Breckenridge
1:15  Khumisho Moguerane - Hymns of Home: Vernacular Categories and the Intersections between the Local and the Global, Home and Away
           Carolyn Hamilton – Convening Differently 

2:00 Break

2:15    Makhosazana Xaba – Archival Activism
             Isabel Hofmeyr -  There’s a Bug in my Media: Insects, Colonial Archives and Bug History

3:00 Tea

Thursday August 17

12noon Lunch at WISER

12:30 Stefan Helgesson - On Legibility: What the Archive Wants from Us
            Innocentia Mhlambi - Digitising differently: The world of difference in spaces of the visually impaired Rubric

1:15  Ashleigh Harris - African Literary Metadata and the Semantic Web
          Sanele Ntshingana - A reading of long African intellectual genealogies of political authority through a concept of umbuso

2:00 Break

2:15 Daisy Selematsela -  Decolonisation, Digitisation and the Archive: Perspectives from Wits Libraries  
         Tinashe Mushakavanhu - Dambudzo Marechera's digital afterlives

3:00 Sarah Nuttall – Closing Comments: The University, Redistributing Itself

3:30  Close

*Please find speakers abstracts here*

This event forms part of the After Decolonization? Programme funded by the Oppenheimer Memorial Trust and the African Digital Humanities Programme.