[Sugarman] Getting started

Dilip Menon Dilip.Menon at wits.ac.za
Wed May 22 14:12:47 SAST 2013


Dear Keith, Primarily Public space Global South Neoliberalism and Social History after Thompson. The range is breath-taking and staggering.

Dilip

From: Keith Breckenridge [mailto:keith at breckenridge.org.za]
Sent: 22 May 2013 11:11 AM
To: sugarman at lists.wits.ac.za
Subject: [Sugarman] Getting started

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<http://wiser.wits.ac.za>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.wits.ac.za/pipermail/sugarman/attachments/20130522/59d6aa24/attachment.html 


More information about the Sugarman mailing list