Public History and Culture in South Africa

Public History and Culture in South Africa PDF

Author: Ali Khangela Hlongwane

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2019-04-11

Total Pages: 282

ISBN-13: 3030147495

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The post-apartheid era in South Africa has, in the space of nearly two decades, experienced a massive memory boom, manifest in a plethora of new memorials and museums and in the renaming of streets, buildings, cities and more across the country. This memorialisation is intricately linked to questions of power, liberation and public history in the making and remaking of the South African nation. Ali Khangela Hlongwane and Sifiso Mxolisi Ndlovu analyse an array of these liberation heritage sites, including the Hector Pieterson Memorial and Museum, the June 16, 1976 Interpretation Centre, the Apartheid Museum and the Mandela House Museum, foregrounding the work of migrant workers, architects, visual artists and activists in the practice of memorialisation. As they argue, memorialisation has been integral to the process of state and nation formation from the pre-colonial era through the present day.

Public History and Culture in South Africa

Public History and Culture in South Africa PDF

Author: Ali Khangela Hlongwane

Publisher:

Published: 2021

Total Pages: 354

ISBN-13: 9780620957229

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In South Africa, with the end of formal apartheid in 1994, the national government, provincial and local authorities have made all possible the memorialization of the anti-apartheid and liberation struggles that deserve critical attention and reflection. This is necessary because who were directly involved are growing older and their stories/narratives have begun to recede into the past in the name of continued social, economic, and political progress. Architects, urban planners and heritage professionals continue to play an important role in the memory-making and recording/telling process across South Africa’s cultural landscape. Moreover, museum are spaces and institutions that collect, houses, research, reflect on, circulate and exhibit objects of historical, scientific, artistic and cultural significance. The nation’s representation of culture in its museums is also revealing of dominant ideologies and to a degree may be interpreted as a kaleidoscope of research and collecting foci of the time.

History After Apartheid

History After Apartheid PDF

Author: Annie E. Coombes

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2003-11-24

Total Pages: 396

ISBN-13: 9780822330721

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DIVHow should post-apartheid South Africa present its history - in museums, monuments, and parks./div

Unsettled History

Unsettled History PDF

Author: Leslie Witz

Publisher: University of Michigan Press

Published: 2017-02-27

Total Pages: 328

ISBN-13: 047212255X

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Unsettled History examines South African society and the construction and presentation of its public pasts, from Nelson Mandela’s release from prison in 1990 to South Africa’s hosting of the 2010 FIFA World Cup ®. Conventionally represented as a time of rectifying the silences and distortions of settler history through inclusion and recovery, the focus here instead is on the shifts in processes and locations of historicizing and the unsettled state of categories of framing history in post-apartheid South Africa. This era saw fundamental transformations in the order of knowledge: from the academy to the public; from popular history to public history; from history-as-lesson to history-as-forum. Leslie Witz, Gary Minkley, and Ciraj Rassool take the reader to sites of historical production in which complex ideas about pasts are invoked, and navigate a path toward understanding the agencies of image-making and memory production. This volume is the outcome of the authors’ intensive collaborative research and engagement over twenty-five years on questions including the production and performance of apartheid history; the cultural politics of social history; South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission and practices of orality; tourism as an arena of image-making and historical construction; museums as sites of heritage production for a new South Africa; photographs, archival meanings, and the construction of the social documentary; and the centenary commemorations of the South African War and the making of race. The authors not only witnessed many of these instances of history-making but were also participants in their constitution.

Public History and School

Public History and School PDF

Author: Marko Demantowsky

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2018-12-17

Total Pages: 296

ISBN-13: 311046408X

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How do schools and public history influence each other? Cases studies focusing on school and public history around the world shed light on the intricate relationships between schools, students, teachers, policy makers and public historians. From why Robben Island is not included in South African curriculum to how German schools shape Holocaust memory, the case studies offered in this book sheds light on a current topic.

Archives of Times Past

Archives of Times Past PDF

Author: Cynthia Kros

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2022-02

Total Pages: 360

ISBN-13: 1776147278

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Archives of Times Past' explores particular sources of evidence on southern Africa's time before the colonial era. It gathers recent ideas about archives and archiving from scholars in southern Africa and elsewhere, focusing on the question: 'How do we know, or think we know, what happened in the times before European colonialism?'0The essays by well-known historians, archaeologists and researchers engage these questions from a range of perspectives and in illuminating ways. Written from personal experience, they capture how these experts encountered their archives of knowledge beyond the textbook.0The essays are written at a time when public discussion about the history of southern Africa before the colonial era is taking place more openly than at any other time in the last hundred years They will appeal to students, academics, educationists, teachers, archivists, and heritage, museum practitioners and the general public.

What Is Public History Globally?

What Is Public History Globally? PDF

Author: Paul Ashton

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2019-01-10

Total Pages: 392

ISBN-13: 1350033278

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Across the globe, history has gone public. With the rise of the internet, family historians are now delving into archives continents apart. Activists look into and recreate the past to promote social justice or environmental causes. Dark and difficult pasts are confronted at sites of commemoration. Artists draw on memory and the past to study the human condition and make meaning in the present. As a result of this democratisation of history, public history movements have now risen to prominence. This groundbreaking edited collection takes a comprehensive look at public history throughout the world. Divided into three sections - Background, Definitions and Issues; Approaches and Methods; and Sites of Public History - it contextualises public history in eleven different countries, explores the main research skills and methods of the discipline and illustrates public history research with a variety of global case studies. What is Public History Globally? provides an in-depth examination of the ways in which ordinary people become active participants in historical processes and it will be an invaluable resource for advance undergraduates and postgraduates studying public history, museology and heritage studies.

A Companion to Public History

A Companion to Public History PDF

Author: David M. Dean

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2018-07-30

Total Pages: 576

ISBN-13: 1118508920

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An authoritative overview of the developing field of public history reflecting theory and practice around the globe This unique reference guides readers through this relatively new field of historical inquiry, exploring the varieties and forms of public history, its relationship with popular history, and the ways in which the field has evolved internationally over the past thirty years. Comprised of thirty-four essays written by a group of leading international scholars and public history practitioners, the work not only introduces readers to the latest scholarly academic research, but also to the practice and pedagogy of public history. It pays equal attention to the emergence of public history as a distinct field of historical inquiry in North America, the importance of popular history and ‘history from below’ in Europe and European colonial-settler states, and forms of historical consciousness in non-Western countries and peoples. It also provides a timely guide to the state of the discipline, and offers an innovative and unprecedented engagement with methodological and theoretical problems associated with public history. Generously illustrated throughout, The Companion to Public History’s chapters are written from a variety of perspectives by contributors from all continents and from a wide variety of backgrounds, disciplines, and experiences. It is an excellent source for getting readers to think about history in the public realm, and how present day concerns shape the ways in which we engage with and represent the past. Cutting-edge companion volume for a developing area of study Comprises 36 essays by leading authorities on all aspects of public history around the world Reflects different national/regional interpretations of public history Offers some essays in teachable forms: an interview, a roundtable discussion, a document analysis, a photo essay. Covers a full range of public history practice, including museums, archives, memorial sites as well as historical fiction, theatre, re-enactment societies and digital gaming Discusses the continuing challenges presented by history within our broad, collective memory, including museum controversies, repatriation issues, ‘textbook’ wars, and commissions for Truth and Reconciliation The Companion is intended for senior undergraduate students and graduate students in the rapidly growing field of public history and will appeal to those teaching public history or who wish to introduce a public history dimension to their courses.

Slavery and Public History

Slavery and Public History PDF

Author: James Oliver Horton

Publisher: The New Press

Published: 2014-03-25

Total Pages: 374

ISBN-13: 1595587446

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“A fascinating collection of essays” by eminent historians exploring how we teach, remember, and confront the history and legacy of American slavery (Booklist Online). In recent years, the culture wars have called into question the way America’s history of slavery is depicted in books, films, television programs, historical sites, and museums. In the first attempt to examine the historiography of slavery, this unique collection of essays looks at recent controversies that have played out in the public arena, with contributions by such noted historians as Ira Berlin, David W. Blight, and Gary B. Nash. From the cancellation of the Library of Congress’s “Back of the Big House” slavery exhibit at the request of the institution’s African American employees, who found the visual images of slavery too distressing, to the public reaction to DNA findings confirming Thomas Jefferson’s relationship with his slave Sally Hemings, Slavery and Public History takes on contemporary reactions to the fundamental contradiction of American history—the existence of slavery in a country dedicated to freedom—and offers a bracing analysis of how Americans choose to remember the past, and how those choices influence our politics and culture. “Americans seem perpetually surprised by slavery—its extent (North as well as South), its span (over half of our four centuries of Anglo settlement), and its continuing influence. The wide-ranging yet connected essays in [this book] will help us all to remember and understand.” —James W. Loewen, author of Sundown Towns

History after Apartheid

History after Apartheid PDF

Author: Annie E. Coombes

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2003-11-24

Total Pages: 393

ISBN-13: 0822384922

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The democratic election of Nelson Mandela as president of South Africa in 1994 marked the demise of apartheid and the beginning of a new struggle to define the nation’s past. History after Apartheid analyzes how, in the midst of the momentous shift to an inclusive democracy, South Africa’s visual and material culture represented the past while at the same time contributing to the process of social transformation. Considering attempts to invent and recover historical icons and narratives, art historian Annie E. Coombes examines how strategies for embodying different models of historical knowledge and experience are negotiated in public culture—in monuments, museums, and contemporary fine art. History after Apartheid explores the dilemmas posed by a wide range of visual and material culture including key South African heritage sites. How prominent should Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress be in the museum at the infamous political prison on Robben Island? How should the postapartheid government deal with the Voortrekker Monument mythologizing the Boer Trek of 1838? Coombes highlights the contradictory investment in these sites among competing constituencies and the tensions involved in the rush to produce new histories for the “new” South Africa. She reveals how artists and museum officials struggled to adequately represent painful and difficult histories ignored or disavowed under apartheid, including slavery, homelessness, and the attempted destruction of KhoiSan hunter-gatherers. Describing how contemporary South African artists address historical memory and the ambiguities uncovered by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Coombes illuminates a body of work dedicated to the struggle to simultaneously remember the past and move forward into the future.