Archive and Public Culture Research Initiative website launched

This month saw the launch of a sleek new website for the Archive & Public Culture Research Initiative, a dynamic trans-disciplinary research group based at the University of Cape Town.

The website http://www.apc.uct.ac.za will keep people updated on the activities of the group, which was established to grapple with critical questions about history, memory, identity and the public sphere in South Africa. Funded by the National Research Foundation, the Andrew B. Mellon Foundation and the Ford Foundation, this five-year interdisciplinary research project based in UCT’s Social Anthropology Department brings together leading established and emerging scholars to explore the workings of the archive in contemporary culture.

‘In our work we interrogate the politics of commemoration, the mobilisation of public memory, and the challenges of public memory haunted by loss, whether of people, lands or of archive itself,’ says NRF Chair in Archive & Public Culture, Professor Carolyn Hamilton. ‘We are especially interested in understanding the role of material and visual culture in underwriting knowledge about the past, and explore how varied visual forms and literary appropriations and creations of archive capture or imagine time.’
The website, which was designed by forward-looking Johannesburg design agency PR/NS Design and built by Dream Real Digital, features pages that highlight the diverse fields of interest being tackled by of each of the associated researchers – based both locally and internationally – some of whom work in the field of history and anthropology, others in literature, music and contemporary visual art.
‘There can be no transformation of the curriculum, or indeed of knowledge itself, without an interrogation of archive,’ writes Professor Njabulo Ndebele, who is an associate research fellow and active participant in the APC’s quarterly research workshops.

The website also details the activities of the APC’s weekly reading group, seminar series and other related events. Texts that have come under the group’s radar include Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever, Premesh Lalu’s Deaths of Hintsa, Giorgio Agamben’s Remnants of Auschwitz and Anne Laura Stoler’s Along the Archival Grain. Recent topics have included the notion of ‘the indigenous’ and ‘silences in the archive’.

The site will keep people updated on research developments in and around the field of archive and public culture, with regular news events posted on the home page alerting audiences to public events and key debates on themes of archive, heritage, commemoration, mourning and historical flashbacks as they percolate in South African public life. So, if you’re interested in how the spectres of the past slip in and out of our view of contemporary culture, then bookmark www.apc.uct.ac.za

Leave a comment