[Sugarman] Getting started

[Geoff Eley]

Dear all,

My apologies for some slowness in being able to respond. I'm currently away
in the UK and getting to email only unevenly. Aside from wholeheartedly
supporting the general goals and purposes of this terrific collaboration,
I'm something of an outsider to the collective conversation given my fields
and areas of specialization, and I suspect that I'm on the list because of
the accident of being UM History Chair, which is now at an end!

However, I'll be delighted to be involved in the project as it continues to
move forward, if you're interested in having me. Among the proposed themes,
I can claim a strong set of theoretical and historiographical interests
relating to *Legacies of the Imperial Archive*, *Interrogating Neoliberalism
*, and the *Global South as an Idea and Source of Theory*. But the one
particular theme mentioned in the subsidiary list that connects with what
I'm doing, going back now over many years, would be *Social History after
Edward Thompson*. E.g. I've been heavily in demand during the past couple
of years for panels and workshops prompted by the 50th anniversary of *The
Making of the English Working Class*, the next of which will be a
conference on the subject in November at Urbana-Champaign.

It's really fabulous that the project will be up and running. Thanks and
congratulations to all those whose work and ideas helped it to happen!

All best wishes,

Geoff



On Wed, May 22, 2013 at 5:11 AM, Keith Breckenridge <
keith at breckenridge.org.za> wrote:

> Dear friends,
>
> We should now begin to assemble the people, ideas and projects that will
> carry this collaboration project for the next five years.   Our proposal is
> clear about the themes we have in mind, and we had to adjust theme to meet
> Mellon's objections, so we should try, very hard, to stick to them.   It
> might be necessary, and interesting, to set up subsets within each of these
> themes, narrow or expand them, but let's see how far we can get before we
> do that.
>
> To begin with we have in mind workshops in Johannesburg in our late Summer
> (timed to coincide with the Michigan Spring Break), and workshops in Ann
> Arbor in the Fall, probably in September.  (The exact dates will have to be
> worked out by the workshop committees).
>
> Our first object should be to assemble committees around the themes we
> have selected, and to do that the easiest way to begin will be for people
> to indicate in which of the themes (at the bottom of this message) they'd
> be interested to participate.
>
> Please reply to the list (yes, that will generate a bit of mail)
> explaining your interests.   For many people at both institutions this will
> be a useful way to meet potential collaborators.  WISER and the ASC will
> use those replies to assemble the committees.
>
> WISER will support the project vigorously throughout, intellectually and
> politically, but the committees will be responsible for at least the
> following things (and I'm sure that there will be more):
>
> 1) Assembling a group of thirty interesting people, including about a
> dozen who will fly from one side of the world to the other.   Most of those
> people, but not all, should come from (or have very close links with)  Wits
> or Michigan.
>
> 2)  Chose readings, and works in progress from participants, to ensure
> that the workshops produce new kinds of arguments and advance what we know
> and think about each of the problems.
>
> 3)  Plan for publication of some of the work, ideally as a special edition
> in one of the journals well matched to the problems.
>
> 4)  Think carefully through a program of events -- workshops, lectures,
> exhibitions, visits -- that will (again) produce new and stronger insights
> in to each problem area.
>
> The proposed themes include:
>
>    -     Legacies of the imperial archive in post-colonial history,
>    museums and performance
>    -     Textual analysis, visual culture and the state in the making of
>    African publics
>    -     Interrogating Neoliberalism as idea and explanation
>    -     The politics of literacy, legibility and expert knowledges in
>    Africa
>    -     Narrative, visual forms and biopolitics in the medical humanities
>    -     Cultural studies of science and technology in Africa
>    -     Intellectual property and curatorship in the digital humanities
>    -     Public spaces, informality and infrastructures in the
>    desegregating city
>    -     Vernacular literatures in the making of transnational movements
>    and subjects
>    -     The Global South as an idea and a source of theory
>
> In addition, we have six themes mentioned in the proposal which we might
> reasonably adapt or (ideally) join to the list above.
>
>    - The perils and possibilities of the digital humanities in Africa
>    - Social History after Edward Thompson
>    - The politics of heritage
>    -  Province and diaspora in African intellectual history
>    - The cultural politics of science and technology
>    - The cultural politics of performance and media
>
> Many thanks, Keith
>
> --
> Keith Breckenridge  *W I S E R* - The Wits Institute for Social and
> Economic Research, University of the Witwatersrand | Pbag 3, PO Wits,
>  Johannesburg, South Africa, 2050 | Tel: +27117174272  | Fax: 0867654213 |
> Web: wiser.wits.ac.za
>
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>


-- 
Geoff Eley
Karl Pohrt Distinguished University Professor of Contemporary History
Professor of History and German Studies
Chair, Department of History
*********************************************
Department of History
University of Michigan
1029 Tisch Hall
435 South State Street
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1003
(734) 763-2289
ghe at umich.edu
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