Unsettled History

Witz, Leslie; Minkley, Gary; Rassool, Ciraj

doi:10.3998/mpub.9200634

Cited by 46 publications

(10 citation statements)

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“…Giving adequate weight to interview participants or people in the communities where research is conducted may be difficult for some who see doing so as contrary to scholarly standards. Yet, as others have argued, those scholarly practices may also take us too far from the lived experience or the legitimate interpretation of the community (Girdharry 2021:248;Mahuika 2019;Hadfield 2015;Ogot 2001;Witz, Minkley, & Rassool 2017). For example, Katherine Borland wrote of the conflicts she and her grandmother had after Borland interpreted her grandmother's experience going to an American horse race as a young woman through a feminist framework.…”

Section: Authorship Expectations Dialogue and Disagreementmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dialoguing with Retired Nurses: Involving Interview Participants in the Interpretation Process in South Africa

Hadfield¹

2023

Afr. Stud. Rev.

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The African Studies community has reinvigorated discussions about the racial and power dynamics of the field in the past few years. A core question has been how to Africanize knowledge production. Hadfield’s practical example as a white American historian involving Black South African oral history interview participants in different stages of the research process shows that successfully including interview participants in the interpretation stage requires clarity and transparency throughout. If meaningful dialogue is employed and human connections prioritized, the result should be a more accurate and inclusive process that satisfies all, even if scholars and participants disagree.

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Section: Authorship Expectations Dialogue and Disagreementmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dialoguing with Retired Nurses: Involving Interview Participants in the Interpretation Process in South Africa

Hadfield¹

2023

Afr. Stud. Rev.

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“…Plaatje's cinema unsettles. 71 In the various biographies of Plaatje, cinema is associated with the creation and gradual loss of a space of the commons-common language, customary laws, and religious affiliation-and it has in many ways aided in the making of his self-image and his own autobiographic endeavors. Together with the modern press, cinema aided Plaatje in his imaginative conception of a public sphere.…”

Section: Codamentioning

confidence: 99%

Cinema and the Idea of Fieldwork in Sol Plaatje’s Journeys

Almeida

Erasmus

2022

Hist. Afr.

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In the mid-1920s, Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje toured the South African countryside showing films he brought from the Tuskegee Institute in the United States. Plaatje’s cinema tours complemented his educational talks on the status of Africans in the Union of South Africa alongside the material he collected for books, speeches and political tours. Focusing on the itinerant cinema as an element of fieldwork, our article asks what can be learned from approaching Plaatje’s research practices. We consider Plaatje’s methods of research in relation to conventional notions of social scientific fieldwork, which also relied on modern media but were often entangled in colonial projects that projected an image of African rural life. Drawing on letters, novels, and accounts of his film screenings, our essay argues for an interdisciplinary engagement with cinema practices in African history that is attentive to the uses of mass media in research and the pedagogical valences of itinerant film screenings. Considering Plaatje’s cinema alongside the value he attached to travelling and mobility, we argue that his cinema puts the field to work and inspires new practices of research in African Studies.

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“…As Gary Minkley, Ciraj Rassool and I argue, "by combining deep pasts and anticipated futures, photographs and voice asserted the museum and the community as one and the same [and] brought together the living and the dead in a discourse of disappearance and recovery". 69 If one thinks of voices as words that are archived as a composition (or as an assemblage) then the notion of ownership, according to Mbembe, becomes collective. Here is the potential for different histories and challenging institutional practices.…”

Section: Voices Of the Peoplementioning

confidence: 99%

Archives, museums and autobiography: Reflections on write your own history (with a small detour to the University of Bophuthatswana)

Witz

2019

JCH

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This article is the beginning of a series of critical reflections on three projects that employed different technologies to produce histories that were signalled as interior to collectivities of community and assertions of personhood: The Write Your Own History project and book, which was published in the 1980s, which I co-ordinated and wrote, the Lwandle Migrant Labour Museum, 40 kilometres outside central Cape Town, which opened in 2000 and where I have served on the museum board since its inception, and the University of the Western Cape-Robben Island Museum Mayibuye Archive. The three projects of writing history, museum making and archive assemblage I want to suggest can be connected. Not only are they points in what might be seen as a biographic positioning, of thinking about my own involvement as a writing project coordinator, engaged museum board member and a collector of documents, but they also are about history in the public domain and about what is constituted as the category of history. There is a concern in recovering and representing "words" of pasts and turning them into history. So what I do is run these three together; write your own history, make your own museum, assemble your own collection as a way to think about how words are made into history. Yet even in writing this I want to hesitate. How does one attach value to the personal "I" and "our", and how does that translate into "your own"? And part of that autobiographical hesitation takes us on a diversion to a university in a town then named Mmabatho in apartheid's bantustan of Bophuthatswana, some twenty odd kilometres from the Ramatlabama border post with Botswana.

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Unsettled History

Cited by 46 publications

References 0 publications

Dialoguing with Retired Nurses: Involving Interview Participants in the Interpretation Process in South Africa

Dialoguing with Retired Nurses: Involving Interview Participants in the Interpretation Process in South Africa

Cinema and the Idea of Fieldwork in Sol Plaatje’s Journeys

Archives, museums and autobiography: Reflections on write your own history (with a small detour to the University of Bophuthatswana)

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