[Sugarman] Getting started

[Keith Breckenridge]

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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