Literature Review from the year 2008 in the subject History - Miscellaneous, grade: 1,0, University of Cape Town (Department of Historical Studies), course: History & Politics in Africa, language: English, abstract: Working in archives is indeed "the bread and butter" of the historian. Before they go there for the first time however, hardly any student of history has got a thorough understanding of how archives function and what they represent. Thus, for many it turns out to be a quite intimidating experience, because one can all too easily get lost as one rarely has a definite starting point, let alone a proper map for the first descent. On the other hand, some archives offer guided tours that leave their visitors with a feeling of crossing the thresholds to the halls of the past, imbuing them with a sense of awe before all of that stored evidence. The conventional notion of the archive has generally been of a place where evidence about past events is being preserved for present and future generations. This implied the assumption that the primary sources uncovered from the archive were to be treated like impartial witnesses, capable of producing objective knowledge about the past, as long as they were interpreted according to historical methodology. Starting from the assumption that such a conventional idea of the archive is very much outdated, the project of "Refiguring the Archive" is to "bring to bear on `archive ́ an interrogation similar to that which concepts like `canon ́ or `orientalism ́ have undergone" and to "develop our understanding of the circumstances of the creation of the archival record". In order to understand why the above described notion of archive is outdated in the post-modern world and to see the necessity of interrogating "circumstances of the creation of archival record", it proves helpful to remember some of the origins of such questioning. In 1967, Richard Rorty published an anthology with the title "The Linguistic Turn. Recent Essays

Refiguring the Archive at once expresses cutting-edge debates on `the archive' in South Africa and internationally, and pushes the boundaries of those debates. It brings together prominent thinkers from a range of disciplines, mainly South Africans but a number from other countries. Traditionally archives have been seen as preserving memory and as holding the past. The contributors to this book question this orthodoxy, unfolding the ways in which archives construct, sanctify, and bury pasts. In his contribution, Jacques Derrida (an instantly recognisable name in intellectual discourse worldwide) shows how remembering can never be separated from forgetting, and argues that the archive is about the future rather than the past. Collectively the contributors demonstrate the degree to which thinking about archives is embracing new realities and new possibilities. The book expresses a confidence in claiming for archival discourse previously unentered terrains. It serves as an early manual for a time that has already begun.

“[Smith’s] slim collection of essays captures this peculiar moment with startling clarity. . . . The personal and political intermingle for a powerful indictment of America’s social systems.” —TIME, The 100 Must-Read Books of 2020 “While quarantined amid the Covid-19 pandemic, Smith penned six dazzling, trenchant essays burrowing deep into our contemporary culture of disease and upheaval and reflecting on what was ‘once necessary’ that now ‘appears inessential . . .’” —O, The Oprah Magazine, Best Books of 2020 “Smith does more than illuminate what we're going through right now. She offers a model of how to think ourselves through a fraught historical moment without getting hysterical or sanctimonious, without losing our compassion or our appreciation for what's good in other people. She teaches us how to be better at being human.” —John Powers, Fresh Air A New York Times Bestseller Deeply personal and powerfully moving, a short and timely series of reflective essays by one of the most clear-sighted and essential writers of our time. Written during the early months of lockdown, Intimations explores ideas and questions prompted by an unprecedented situation. What does it mean to submit to a new reality--or to resist it? How do we compare relative sufferings? What is the relationship between time and work? In our isolation, what do other people mean to us? How do we think about them? What is the ratio of contempt to compassion in a crisis? When an unfamiliar world arrives, what does it reveal about the world that came before it? Suffused with a profound intimacy and tenderness in response to these extraordinary times, Intimations is a slim, suggestive volume with a wide scope, in which Zadie Smith clears a generous space for thought, open enough for each reader to reflect on what has happened--and what should come next. The author will donate her royalties from the sale of Intimations to charity.

Published to mark the career of one of sports history’s pioneers, this book traces the evolution of sport across three continents. It brings together some of sports history’s leading scholars to investigate not only the history of sport but also how that history is written. This Festschrift marks the retirement of Professor Wray Vamplew – an internationally-renowned leader in the field of sports history. His 1976 book The Turf was one of the very first academic histories of sport and he has been a prolific writer, scholar and teacher for almost forty years. No one has played such an important role in the field of sports history across North America, Europe and Australia. President of the Australian, Australian Society of Sports History (ASSH), the British Society of Sports History (BSSH), the European Committee for the History of Sport (CESH) and the International Society for the History of Physical Education and Sport (ISHPES), Vamplew is currently editor of the North American Society for Sports History’s (NASSH) journal, the Journal of Sport History. This collection reflects his interests and his appeal across the three continents, the essays deal with sport in America, Australia, Britain and Ireland and focus on the themes of national and regional identity, gender, trade unionism in sport and historiographical debates. It is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the history of sport and how it is studied today. This book was published as a special issue of Sport in History.

Presents comprehensive guidance to the international field of sports history as it has developed as an academic area of study. This book guides readers through the development of the field across a range of thematic and geographical contexts. It is suitable for researchers and students in, and entering, the sports history field.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, radical women’s movements and the avant-gardes were often in contact with one another, brought together through the socialist internationals. Juno Jill Richards argues that these movements were not just socially linked but also deeply interconnected. Each offered the other an experimental language that could move beyond the nation-state’s rights of man and citizen, suggesting an alternative conceptual vocabulary for women’s rights. Rather than focus on the demand for the vote, The Fury Archives turns to the daily practices and social worlds of feminist action. It offers an alternative history of women’s rights, practiced by female arsonists, suffragette rioters, industrial saboteurs, self-named terrorists, lesbian criminals, and queer resistance cells. Richards also examines the criminal proceedings that emerged in the wake of women’s actions, tracing the way that citizen and human emerged as linked categories for women on the fringes of an international campaign for suffrage. Recovering a transatlantic print archive, Richards brings together a wide range of activists and artists, including Lumina Sophie, Ina Césaire, Rosa Luxemburg, Rebecca West, Angelina Weld Grimké, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Hannah Höch, Claude Cahun, Paulette Nardal, and Leonora Carrington. An expansive and methodologically innovative book, The Fury Archives argues that the relationship of women’s rights movements and the avant-gardes offers a radical alternative to liberal discourses of human rights in formation at the same historical moment.

This book studies the relationship between photography and history in colonial Southern Africa, using a series of encounters with Southern African photographic archives to reflect on photography as a distinct historical form. Through use of private and public archives, images produced by African itinerant photographers, white settlers, and colonial state institutions, this book explores the relationship between photography and history in colonial Southern Africa. Late nineteenth century Cape Colonial prison albums, police photographs from German Southwest Africa, African studio portraits, identity documents, travel permits and passports from the 1920s and 1930s, visual studies of whiteness and blackness authored by settler photographers, South African dompas photographs from the 1950s and 1960s, and aerial photography from the Eastern Cape in the mid-twentieth century are examined to highlight the ways in which photographic images cut across conventional institutional boundaries and complicate rigid distinctions between the private and the public, the political and the aesthetic, the colonial and the vernacular, or the subject and the object. Photography and History in Colonial Southern Africa argues that rather than understanding photographs as a means of preserving and recreating the past in the present, we can value them for how they evoke at once the need for and the limits of historical reconstruction. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of colonial history, photographic history, visual media, and African studies.