From Najibha.Deshmukh at wits.ac.za Thu May 1 12:09:45 2014 From: Najibha.Deshmukh at wits.ac.za (Najibha Deshmukh) Date: Thu, 1 May 2014 10:09:45 +0000 Subject: [Sugarman] Accommodation confirmation Message-ID: <4F4D7994E300B943BF3CA38918055BCD20FCD58C@ELEUTHIA.ds.WITS.AC.ZA> Dear All Thank you for your patience. I finally have the guest house information attached. This means you now have confirmation for your accommodation and airport pick-up. Should you have any queries with regards to your airport pick-up or accommodation, please contact Jakes as follows: (Mobile) +27 (0) 83 266 5846 (Land line) +27 (0) 11 482 4124 Travel safely and looking forward to meeting you all on Monday. Regards, Najibha -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: GuesthousesConfirmation.xls Type: application/vnd.ms-excel Size: 79872 bytes Desc: GuesthousesConfirmation.xls URL: From keith at breckenridge.org.za Thu May 1 13:39:11 2014 From: keith at breckenridge.org.za (Keith Breckenridge) Date: Thu, 1 May 2014 11:39:11 +0000 Subject: [Sugarman] Transport to Wits Message-ID: <764750772-1398944363-cardhu_decombobulator_blackberry.rim.net-556183349-@b3.c12.bise7.blackberry> Dear all, Ngaka Mosiane and I will meet those staying in Melville at your guest houses at 10:30am on Monday to transport you to Wits. K From Najibha.Deshmukh at wits.ac.za Fri May 2 10:34:13 2014 From: Najibha.Deshmukh at wits.ac.za (Najibha Deshmukh) Date: Fri, 2 May 2014 08:34:13 +0000 Subject: [Sugarman] Updated : Accommodation confirmation Message-ID: <4F4D7994E300B943BF3CA38918055BCD20FCEC08@ELEUTHIA.ds.WITS.AC.ZA> Dear All Herewith attached updated list. Regards, Najibha From: Najibha Deshmukh Sent: 01 May 2014 12:10 PM To: sugarman at lists.wits.ac.za Subject: Accommodation confirmation Dear All Thank you for your patience. I finally have the guest house information attached. This means you now have confirmation for your accommodation and airport pick-up. Should you have any queries with regards to your airport pick-up or accommodation, please contact Jakes as follows: (Mobile) +27 (0) 83 266 5846 (Land line) +27 (0) 11 482 4124 Travel safely and looking forward to meeting you all on Monday. Regards, Najibha -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: Guesthousesconfirmation.xls Type: application/vnd.ms-excel Size: 98304 bytes Desc: Guesthousesconfirmation.xls URL: From keith at breckenridge.org.za Mon May 5 21:43:09 2014 From: keith at breckenridge.org.za (Keith Breckenridge) Date: Mon, 5 May 2014 21:43:09 +0200 Subject: [Sugarman] Arrangements for the remaining sessions Message-ID: Good evening all. We'd like to try some things in the sessions tomorrow; we can assess them tomorrow evening and decide whether to persist with them. 1. In order to encourage Graduate Student participation, we will ask faculty to hold back their questions and comments in the opening 20 minutes (or until all students have spoken). 2. We want to ensure that threads of discussion are properly worked through, and ask that people signal whether their questions and comments are new issues by (politely!) raising two fingers; use one finger to signal an engagement with the current thread of discussion. 3. We'd like to encourage people to live tweet the discussions. Please use #WiserUMich14 (we can discuss better tags tomorrow). 4. I am working on getting more robust wifi, but Danny apparently knows what the Michigan authentication string should be: perhaps, Danny, you can post the instructions here? If you have further suggestions or questions please feel to share them here. Many thanks, k -- 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 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From herwitz at umich.edu Tue May 6 09:51:36 2014 From: herwitz at umich.edu (Daniel Herwitz) Date: Tue, 6 May 2014 03:51:36 -0400 Subject: [Sugarman] Arrangements for the remaining sessions In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Dear All For those at Michigan who want to use EDURoam you must first sign in your username which is your University of Michigan email address (i.e. herwitz at umich.edu). Then the password is your University of Michigan kerberos password. It works well. Keith in terms of your one and two finger instructions am I free to use my middle finger to signal.....? Daniel On Mon, May 5, 2014 at 3:43 PM, Keith Breckenridge < keith at breckenridge.org.za> wrote: > Good evening all. > > We'd like to try some things in the sessions tomorrow; we can assess them > tomorrow evening and decide whether to persist with them. > > 1. In order to encourage Graduate Student participation, we will ask > faculty to hold back their questions and comments in the opening 20 minutes > (or until all students have spoken). > > 2. We want to ensure that threads of discussion are properly worked > through, and ask that people signal whether their questions and comments > are new issues by (politely!) raising two fingers; use one finger to signal > an engagement with the current thread of discussion. > > 3. We'd like to encourage people to live tweet the discussions. Please > use #WiserUMich14 (we can discuss better tags tomorrow). > > 4. I am working on getting more robust wifi, but Danny apparently knows > what the Michigan authentication string should be: perhaps, Danny, you can > post the instructions here? > > If you have further suggestions or questions please feel to share them > here. > > Many thanks, k > > -- > 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 > > This communication is intended for the addressee only. It is confidential. If you have received this communication in error, please notify us immediately and destroy the original message. You may not copy or disseminate this communication without the permission of the University. Only authorised signatories are competent to enter into agreements on behalf of the University and recipients are thus advised that the content of this message may not be legally binding on the University and may contain the personal views and opinions of the author, which are not necessarily the views and opinions of The University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. All agreements between the University and outsiders are subject to South African Law unless the University agrees in writing to the contrary. > > > _______________________________________________ > Sugarman mailing list > Sugarman at lists.wits.ac.za > http://lists.wits.ac.za/mailman/listinfo/sugarman > > -- Daniel Herwitz Frederick G. L. Huetwell Professor Department of Comparative Literature University of Michigan 2012 Tisch Hall 435 South State Street Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1003 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From keith at breckenridge.org.za Tue May 6 11:20:15 2014 From: keith at breckenridge.org.za (Keith Breckenridge) Date: Tue, 6 May 2014 11:20:15 +0200 Subject: [Sugarman] Readings Message-ID: Some people seem to be having trouble accessing the readings for the workshops: This link (the same as before) works at the moment: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/r9udrtlbldq50hf/Nmvjvj3soM -- 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 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From keith at breckenridge.org.za Tue May 6 11:46:38 2014 From: keith at breckenridge.org.za (Keith Breckenridge) Date: Tue, 6 May 2014 11:46:38 +0200 Subject: [Sugarman] Readings In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Gremlins win again. Please try this link if you're having trouble opening individual files: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/ns13rfe18bdy1dv/yEscCRfZyE On Tue, May 6, 2014 at 11:20 AM, Keith Breckenridge < keith at breckenridge.org.za> wrote: > Some people seem to be having trouble accessing the readings for the > workshops: > > This link (the same as before) works at the moment: > > https://www.dropbox.com/sh/r9udrtlbldq50hf/Nmvjvj3soM > > -- > 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 > -- 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 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From Sharad.Chari at wits.ac.za Wed May 7 09:17:00 2014 From: Sharad.Chari at wits.ac.za (Sharad Chari) Date: Wed, 7 May 2014 07:17:00 +0000 Subject: [Sugarman] Arrangements for the remaining sessions In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <0A7507A7310AB24FBD25341240F2A9692AB5A1DA@ELEUTHIA.ds.WITS.AC.ZA> Hi Everyone, Talking to some folks last night, there was a view that now that we've got a lot of general and very engaging views on the table, we ought to engage more critically and carefully with the readings. There was also the view that people on the panels should take a few minutes to talk about their approach to the topic. I don't have the individual emails of my panelists, but can we assume this? Keith, you can still ensure that we don't yap for too long, and that there is as much participation as possible across the room. Thanks, Sharad ________________________________ From: Keith Breckenridge [keith at breckenridge.org.za] Sent: Monday, May 05, 2014 9:43 PM To: sugarman at lists.wits.ac.za Subject: [Sugarman] Arrangements for the remaining sessions Good evening all. We'd like to try some things in the sessions tomorrow; we can assess them tomorrow evening and decide whether to persist with them. 1. In order to encourage Graduate Student participation, we will ask faculty to hold back their questions and comments in the opening 20 minutes (or until all students have spoken). 2. We want to ensure that threads of discussion are properly worked through, and ask that people signal whether their questions and comments are new issues by (politely!) raising two fingers; use one finger to signal an engagement with the current thread of discussion. 3. We'd like to encourage people to live tweet the discussions. Please use #WiserUMich14 (we can discuss better tags tomorrow). 4. I am working on getting more robust wifi, but Danny apparently knows what the Michigan authentication string should be: perhaps, Danny, you can post the instructions here? If you have further suggestions or questions please feel to share them here. Many thanks, k -- 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 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From keith at breckenridge.org.za Wed May 7 18:52:49 2014 From: keith at breckenridge.org.za (Keith Breckenridge) Date: Wed, 7 May 2014 18:52:49 +0200 Subject: [Sugarman] Friday's session on the State Message-ID: Theorising State Practices in Urban Governance in/ from Cities of the South facilitated by Claire Benit-Gbaffou, Sarah Charlton, Anne Pitcher 09 May 2014 *Structure of the session* Introduction by facilitators Presentation of the key questions Contextualisation in the South Facilitators brief presentation of own research *Key Questions* 1) Theoretical Challenges to understanding the Post-Colonial State To begin we borrow from Akhil Gupta: "How come post colonial states with 'the will to improve' (that is from Li) are 'failing' to do so (Gupta) in significant ways, or at least have outcomes that often are complex, unexpected or contradictory?" Theories of the post colonial state tend to either view the state with deep suspicion (alliance with business elites and interests; machinery with an unsound desire to control, tendencies to capture resources and use violence in illegitimate ways), or with a degree of confidence (welfare or developmental state, constructing strong bureaucracies and organisations, rising democratic accountability). This theoretical bifurcation distracts us from conceptualizing the state as the outcome and also the instigator of a more multi-faceted, complex and mixed set of intentions, strategies, and results ? many of which are what is experienced in particular in urban politics and in residents? everyday lives. 2) De-centering the State The forces of urbanization, transnational networks of power, and the growth of International non-governmental organisations and international financial institutions, or what Ferguson has termed "horizontal contemporaries to the state" have de-centered and de-territorialized the post-colonial state in fundamental ways. Emerging theories, especially from anthropology, present a more porous and de-centered state, one that is in constant construction through the daily engagements of states and citizens (state-in-society, the state from its margins, porous bureaucracies). But also, the agents, functions, and organization of "the state" vary dramatically across space. How do we conceptualize and differentiate states across and within different urban spaces, for example, or frame their variegated encounters with activists? Key readings Those marked with * are essential Auyero Auyero, Javier. ??From the Client?s Point(s) of View?: How Poor People Perceive and Evaluate Political Clientelism.? Theory and Society 28, no. 2 (April 1, 1999): 297?334. Challenges our normative understanding of clientelism - in a tradition of Urban Latin American studies, by exploring ?the clients points of view?. does not negate the domination clients are under, but unpacks their agency. Also illustrates the various understandings of the state and society within the same ?community? according to the individual relation to the ?broker? or local patron ? how these relations shape people?s understandings of the state and of social agency. Bahre and Lecocq B?hre, E. and Lecocq, B. (2007). The Drama of Development: The Skirmishes Behind High Modernist Schemes in Africa. African Studies. Vol 66, Issue 1. Special Issue: The Drama of Development B?hre and Lecocq?s article is an introduction to a special issue of African Studies. They argue that the contributions in the special issue reveal the limits of state power (in various African contexts) but more importantly the variations in outcomes at the intersection of development, community and the state. Deviating from Scott and aligning more with their interpretation of Li they posit that ?confusion, chaos and uncertainty? are typical characteristics of development: the ?skirmishes? between state and community in the development terrain have different outcomes, some of these can be violent, some are predominantly negative for recipients, others positively transforming or life-enhancing. A close examination of particular situations is therefore needed to move beyond the domination/ resistance/ compliance paradigm, to understand better how the interface is shaped. *Chatterjee, chapter 3 Chatterjee, Partha. The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World. Columbia University Press, 2004, "Chapter 3 The Politics of the Governed." Posits the concept of ?political society? (as opposed to civil society, the minority of full right bearing citizens) as a mode of governmentality of ?the majority of the world? ? residents whose life is shaped to some extent by informality (in access to housing, services, economic activities). Political society is grounded in a democratic society where the mass of the poor (and informal) can use their political right to vote as a means to precariously frame some temporary access to state resources (mostly through arrangements with local bureaucrats and politicians). *Goh and Bunnell Goh, Daniel P.S., and Tim Bunnell. ?Recentering Southeast Asian Cities: Recentering Southeast Asian Cities.? International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 37, no. 3 (May 2013): 825?33. This is an 8 page intro to a symposium on SE Asian Cities in IJURR. Goh and Bunnell's main point is that much research on cities in Asia and elsewhere has been dominated by "metrocentricity"or rather, a focus on global cities as opposed to focusing on less prominent or so-called "secondary" cities. The tendency to focus on megacities in Asia has taken place because they are the most globally connected and therefore have characteristics that invite comparisons with the West. But this has come at a cost. There is a tendency in the literature to juxtapose the wealthy areas to the slums; formal to informal; to trade off the influence of transnational capital or the developmental state versus grassroots activism in the slums. With the spread of administrative decentralization, however, it is now more important to focus on a variety of cities because as political authority fragments so does the ability to exercise agency. Decentered cities contain or enclose popular politics, reproducing a fragmentation among social movements that mirrors the diversity of urban space. *Gupta?s intro of Red Tape / paper on corruption Gupta, Akhil. ?Blurred Boundaries: The Discourse of Corruption, the Culture of Politics, and the Imagined State.? American Ethnologist 22, no. 2 (May 1, 1995): 375?402. Poses the question from the paradox of seeing well intentioned bureaucrats and politicians committed to development, with increasing resources and capacity to act; and yet the persistence of mass poverty, inequality and structural violence in India. In the introduction Gupta starts theorising on the ?systematic arbitrariness of bureaucratic outcomes in its provision of care?, contesting a foucauldian view of the state bureaucracy as ?rationalised power in a disciplinary society?; producing ?bare lives? (agamden) where structural violence done to the poor on an everyday basis becomes an accepted condition. *Li Li, Tania Murray. ?Beyond ?the State? and Failed Schemes.? American Anthropologist 107, no. 3 (2005): 383?94. Takes seriously the ?will to improve? in developmental states, questions the ?failure? of developmental schemes (a la scott) and proposes to study what these schemes ?do? rather than analyse them in terms of failure. Michelle Ann Miller Miller, Michelle Ann. ?Decentralizing Indonesian City Spaces as New ?Centers?: Decentralizing Indonesian City Spaces as New ?centers.?? International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 37, no. 3 (May 2013): 834?48. Miller argues against two contrasting claims in the literature: first, the argument that Indonesian cities are just mimicking the West and second that there is an "Asian model" with specific features that are distinguishable from those of the West. She concedes that urban forms such as gated communities, shopping malls, and a penchant for urban planning may have arisen in the West, but Indonesian also borrow from each other and rely on transnational models that may come from the Middle East, from Islam, etc. These multiple influences make cities in Indonesia a hodgepodge of different multiscalar, many layered urban forms with their own tensions and contradictions. Significant among these is decentralization which has on the one hand granted more autonomy to different actors at the local level but also opened up a grey area of opportunities with regard to the exercise of political authority and produced highly unneven urban spaces across the country. One sees dramatic decline in one region versus high level branding of world class cities in another. *Robins Robins, S. (2003). Whose Modernity? Indigenous Modernities and Land Claims after Apartheid. Development and Change. 34(2): 265-258 Robins? first point is that contrary to a typical post-development critique, state initiated development interventions can be appropriated and transformed in complex ways which constitute neither rejection nor straightforward acceptance of them by intended recipients. The second point is a challenge to Ferguson, arguing that undertaking development is an uncertain and precarious project for states as it can fail and undermine authority. The state and its development projects are not as powerful as often assumed, and peoples? responses can be more powerful or have more agency than assumed. The empirical work he draws on is SA rural. *Roy Roy, Ananya (2009) ?Why India Cannot Plan Its Cities: Informality, Insurgence, and the Idiom of Urbanization? Planning Theory, 8:1, 76-87. Studies informality as a creation of the state and exposes states? own ?informal practices?. Posits these state informal practices as intentional (state engaged in a neoliberal/ accumulation or speculative project on urban land in particular), but states that this use of informality (?un-mapping?, opaque information) might well render the state unable to plan and to eventually govern. Von Holdt Von Holdt, Karl. ?South Africa: The Transition to Violent Democracy.? Review of African Political Economy 40, no. 138 (2013): 589?604. Looks at the paradox of a SA nascent democracy, with state institutions expressing rupture with the apartheid past, and yet increasingly resorting to violence to regulate access to resources. Uses rational theory literature (North et al) to explain factionalism, instability and recourse to intra-state violence for shifting elites to maintain or access to rents. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hechtg at umich.edu Thu May 15 10:17:46 2014 From: hechtg at umich.edu (Gabrielle Hecht) Date: Thu, 15 May 2014 08:17:46 +0000 Subject: [Sugarman] Toxicity, Waste, Detritus: Abstract solicitation and upload Instructions References: Message-ID: Dear all, The "Toxicity, Detritus and Waste" group (managed by Pamila Gupta and me) met this week to discuss ways of moving forward with this theme. In the long term, we hope to produce a collection of short, experimental verbal or visual essays (~2000 words), aimed at venues such as Africa is a Country Somatosphere Chimurenga and others (suggestions welcome). Steps toward that goal include articulating preliminary ideas, reading works in common, holding a workshop, and others to be determined. Step 1: sharing preliminary abstracts We agreed to share preliminary abstracts: low-stakes paragraphs merely intended to sketch out initial ideas about what we each want to explore. Capitalizing on the momentum we've built, we agreed to do these by TOMORROW, Friday 16 May. We'd initially thought we'd upload these into Dropbox, but Natasha heroically seized the day and built a WordPress site. So, please follow the instructions below to upload your abstract directly onto our Wordpress site! It's very simple, we promise. NOTE: We welcome your participation even if you couldn't attend the retreat (and thus the discussion). Please just let me and Pamila (Pamila.Gupta at wits.ac.za) know that you'd like to join us. We will ask that you too upload an abstract, but we'll give you an extra week to do it (i.e., until Friday 23 May). Please do pipe up soon: we will create a separate email list for this theme, so as not to burden the whole Sugarman site. If we don't know about your interest, we can't include you! These abstracts will enable us to identify and clarify common interests and sharpen our focus and intentions. We can consider them as provisional, so you need not feel that you're locking yourself in! Step 2: sharing bibliographic material In order to have a common base, we ask everyone to submit up to 5 bibliographic items pertaining to our theme by 15 June. These can be texts, video, artistic material, etc. We will send more detailed guidelines later -- for now this is just a heads up. Step 3: setting a workshop date By the end of August, we aim to have set a date for a workshop sometime in the 2nd half of 2015. Keep an eye out for emails on this point. Looking forward to interesting collaborations! WORDPRESS UPLOAD INSTRUCTIONS A. Overview As mentioned above, Natasha Vally went ahead with setting up our site, and with writing instructions for all of us. THANK YOU Natasha! The intention is to have a very simple website that we can use for collaboration and sharing of text, video, audio and pictures. We will also use it for our longer term scheduling. View this as an experimental space -- we can update and shape it as needed. B. Wordpress Instructions These are really very simple and, if you have email, should not be a challenge at all. In order to keep this fun and collaborative, we need everyone to "buy in" by doing your bit! To add your abstract to the site http://toxicityandwaste.wordpress.com/ 1. Go to the Wordpress login page at https://en.wordpress.com/wp-login.php 2. As your username: toxicitywastedetritus password: toxicityandwastepassword (Note: if you already have a Wordpress account, you'll need to log out of that and log back in with the above username) 3.You will be taken to the Toxicity and Waste Wordpress site 4. On the left you'll see a tab that says "pages", click on "all pages" 5. If you scroll down you will see a page called "preliminary abstracts" and when you hover your mouse under it you will see "edit" click that 6. Now you just need to insert your paragraph into the block, below the ones already there. Please format your text following the ones that are already there: title in bold, your name and affiliation in italics, then your abstract in regular font. 7.Once you are done, click "update" on the right hand side of the page (it is is a blue button) 8. Done! You can view all the abstracts and all other information at http://toxicityandwaste.wordpress.com/ If you are having serious issues, you can email natasha.vally at gmail.com for assistance. But please don't just ask her to do it for you -- give it your best effort first! Closer to June, we will resend instructions on how to add your bibliographic suggestions. They are very similar to the instructions above. Gabrielle Hecht Professor of History, University of Michigan Director, Program in Science, Technology, and Society Associate Director, African Studies Center -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From keith at breckenridge.org.za Thu May 15 16:19:29 2014 From: keith at breckenridge.org.za (Keith Breckenridge) Date: Thu, 15 May 2014 16:19:29 +0200 Subject: [Sugarman] Thursday and Friday for Workshop participants Message-ID: Dear all, I hope that you have all made it back safe and sound from the Platinum mines. This afternoon a bus will be coming to 84th on 4th at 5:15pm to pick up the people from my bus for the dinner and the movie "Spectres" at Wiser. There is more on the event here. Ngaka please will you take your people to Wits at the same time. I will be fetching young debaters from the airport, so I cannot provide transport, but I'm confident that you will all find your way home. If you find yourself stuck at Wits call me on 0726519248. Tomorrow at 12:30pm I will be outside 84th on 4th to transport people to Wits. Please ensure that you've eaten as there will not be a meal at Wits. From 1 to 2:30pm we will join Isabel Hofmeyr and Sarah Nuttall for "Writing from Johannesburg", and then from 3pm we will have a short recap session and a longer planning meeting to think through what we will be doing next. Yours, k -- 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 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jawenzel at umich.edu Fri May 16 09:33:02 2014 From: jawenzel at umich.edu (Jennifer Wenzel) Date: Fri, 16 May 2014 03:33:02 -0400 Subject: [Sugarman] Report from the Culture/Theory dinner meeting Message-ID: At the "Culture" dinner, we shared possible ideas and interests but did not leave the meeting with an idea for one coherent project to launch. I asked participants to continue to think about whether they saw common threads or a central question (or, perhaps rather, two or more entirely separate questions) that our work might constellate around. During yesterday's road trip I debriefed Marissa about the meeting, and in that conversation I began to see one possible cluster of papers. This would have to do with ideas of space- and place-making through cultural production, particularly in terms of how cultural objects and producers imagine and situate themselves within broader geographic and geopolitical imaginaries (anti-apartheid, Cold War, decolonization/national liberation, or, somewhat differently, a Pentecostal ecumene), as well as re-imaginings of such work and such geographies in the present (ie. the shift from "frontline," "Third World," or "Africanist" to "Global South"). There also seems to be a common thread involving sponsorship and patronage (by state or private entities) in the marketing and circulation of such objects. So, I would love to hear from Culture dinner folks, as well as those who weren't able to attend, about your interest in this topic, or other possible topic clusters that seem promising. And I'm looking forward to Sarah and Isabel's talk today as further inspiration. Cheers, Jennifer -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From nrhunt at umich.edu Fri May 16 10:36:32 2014 From: nrhunt at umich.edu (Nancy Hunt) Date: Fri, 16 May 2014 10:36:32 +0200 Subject: [Sugarman] Report from the Global South as an Idea In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <3DDAA807-135B-4B48-A6EB-9D20E60E0ED3@umich.edu> On the Global South as an Idea group, I offer this update for one and all. The following message seems to have never reached Achille (returned by Wits email last night). And of course we have not been able to meet as a full group since our brief meeting at the Safari resort. And our dinner was planned for tonight. Still we are now about 5 members plus, and keen to make alliances as these make sense. Since it will be our last dinner together, it may be difficult to huddle for long, though we will try?depending on what emerges at the planning sessions earlier today. With this email, I invite anyone else who would like to be involved to please send ME or US an email. Written several days ago; > Dear Achille and Damola, and also Jennifer and Kalema who have expressed interest in our group, > > Since Global South as an Idea will go last, during the final dinner on Friday night, I jot these few minutes from our meeting yesterday, so you may all chime in and tell me what I have wrong. Or should be changed. > > Achille suggested inviting and curating a website with short texts about the Global South as an Idea (or analytic, topology, spatialization, discourse, etc), written by scholars, artists, activists, and public intellectuals around the world. > We then discussed a first conference in Ann Arbor in October 2015, with perhaps 2 sessions over 2 days, in which some 20 mostly UM and Wits scholars would be given 5 minutes each to answer a critical question about the Global South, with much representation from persons working outside our Africa box, in other domains and spaces around the world. > We then wondered if mounting the best of these 5-minute texts as the initial takes on the proposed website, as well as perhaps some of the recorded, videoed, or textualized debate would not be an easier, less labor-intensive way to proceed. > Likely one or more sessions would happen in Detroit, where with Detroit scholars, activists, and artists, we might ponder whether it makes any sense to think Detroit as an Idea as part of the Global South. > > Planning for the October 2015 conference would take place between Jo'burg (Achille), Paris (Nancy), and Damola (Ann Arbor), and when Achille visits Ann Arbor this coming academic year, Damola and he will have a chance for further logistical planning. > > Intellectual planning would begin by our assembling a provocative Position Statement, to be circulated to invited 5-minute speakers at the Ann Arbor conference at the time of invitation. > > QUESTION: How would we like to plan for the Friday dinner? The question remains open. Please come with ideas, please stay tuned. Yours, Nancy > > > > This communication is intended for the addressee only. It is confidential. If you have received this communication in error, please notify us immediately and destroy the original message. You may not copy or disseminate this communication without the permission of the University. Only authorised signatories are competent to enter into agreements on behalf of the University and recipients are thus advised that the content of this message may not be legally binding on the University and may contain the personal views and opinions of the author, which are not necessarily the views and opinions of The University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. All agreements between the University and outsiders are subject to South African Law unless the University agrees in writing to the contrary. > _______________________________________________ > Sugarman mailing list > Sugarman at lists.wits.ac.za > http://lists.wits.ac.za/mailman/listinfo/sugarman -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From keith at breckenridge.org.za Mon May 19 23:34:37 2014 From: keith at breckenridge.org.za (Keith Breckenridge) Date: Mon, 19 May 2014 23:34:37 +0200 Subject: [Sugarman] Questions for assessment Message-ID: Dear all. Now that most people have returned to something like normality please spend a moment thinking about the questions you'd like to include in the on-line evaluation. Send them to me and I'll compile the survey. I'd like to get this out by the end of the week. Many thanks, K -- 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 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From keith at breckenridge.org.za Tue May 20 08:31:53 2014 From: keith at breckenridge.org.za (Keith Breckenridge) Date: Tue, 20 May 2014 08:31:53 +0200 Subject: [Sugarman] Fwd: Miners' Support In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: And this may be of interest to some of you. ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Noor Nieftagodien Date: Tue, May 20, 2014 at 8:19 AM Subject: Miners' Support To: Sedzani Malada , Ingrid Chunilall < Ingrid.Chunilall at wits.ac.za>, Antje Schuhmann , Antonette Gouws , "Anton Harber ( anton at harber.co.za) (anton at harber.co.za)" , Pulane Ditlhake , Pumla Gqola , Maria Suriano , Mucha Musemwa < mucha.musemwa at wits.ac.za>, Sekibakiba Lekgoathi < Sekibakiba.Lekgoathi at wits.ac.za>, Prishani Naidoo < Prishani.Naidoo at wits.ac.za>, Prinisha Badassy , Kelly Gillespie , Keith Breckenridge < keith at breckenridge.org.za>, Arianna Lissoni , Franziska Rueedi , "ahmed veriava ( ahmedveriava at gmail.com)" , Shireen Ally < Shireen.Ally at wits.ac.za>, Shireen Hassim , Daryl Glaser , Peter Hudson , Ben Scully , Bridget Kenny , Christa Kuljian , Cynthia Kros < Cynthia.Kros at wits.ac.za>, David Everatt , Dilip Menon , Ebrahim Momoniat < Ebrahim.Momoniat at wits.ac.za>, Zimitri Erasmus Cc: Bhekizizwe Peterson , Kezia Lewins < Kezia.Lewins at wits.ac.za>, Devan Pillay , Seeraj Mohamed , Glenda Daniels < Glenda.Daniels at wits.ac.za>, Michael Titlestad , Shahid Vawda , Ruksana Osman < Ruksana.Osman at wits.ac.za>, Tawana Kupe , Rob Moore < Rob.Moore at wits.ac.za>, Melissa Steyn , " loren at migration.org.za" , Aurelia Segatti < Aurelia.Segatti at wits.ac.za>, Julian Brown , Nolwazi Mkhwanazi , "Gavin Capps ( gavin.capps at talk21.com)" , Tshepo Moloi < Tshepo.Moloi at wits.ac.za>, Francine De Clercq , Sarah Mosoetsa , "Sarah Godsell ( sdgodsell at gmail.com)" , Sarah Charlton < Sarah.Charlton at wits.ac.za>, "kporiazis at yahoo.com" , "Danai Mupotsa (danai.mupotsa at gmail.com)" , Benji Seitlhamo , Bonita Meyersfeld < Bonita.Meyersfeld at wits.ac.za>, Christopher Lee , David Andrew , David Hornsby < David.Hornsby at wits.ac.za>, Deborah James , Eric Worby , Achille Mbembe Dear all I am writing to make another urgent appeal for support for the striking miners and their families. The strike is now into its 16th week, the longest strike in the country?s history. The situation around the platinum mines is becoming increasingly desperate, both politically and in terms of the worsening humanitarian crisis. Nationally the effort to mobilise support is gaining momentum with NGOs, religious organisations and political movements providing solidarity. In Gauteng, Gift of the Givers has provided some support. But we are nowhere close to meeting the needs on the ground. There are 70 000 workers on strike and they have between 150 000 ? 200 000 direct dependents. Since the appeal made last week, we at Wits have collected a mere R3000 and two parcels of food. We are hoping to raise enough money or food to put together at least 200 food parcels. Various organisations and institutions have been twinned with shafts and communities, and Wits has been asked to supply food to No. 1 shaft at Implats. This week workers employed by outsourced companies will meet to pledge donations. Students have undertaken to put up solidarity tables to raise awareness and to collect donations. There are a couple ways of making your donations: *Cash donations and food should be taken to Ingrid Chunilal or Sedzani Malada in Sociology. We also have students who can collect donations from your office.* *You can also deposit donations into the Marikana Support Committee account. Please use the reference ?food Wits?, so the accountant can keep track of donations made by Wits colleagues. * [Please circulate widely] Account Name: Human Rights Media Trust Bank: Nedbank Branch: Constantia Branch Branch Code: 101109 Account No: 1011102366 SWIFT CODE: NEDSZAJJ Address: Constantia Village Shopping centre, Main Road, Cape Town, South Africa *FOOD PARCELS SHOW WIDE SUPPORT FOR THE MINERS STRIKE * In response to the deepening humanitarian crisis unfolding as a result of the 16 week miners strike, a convoy of four trucks will be heading up to the North West and Limpopo on Monday morning filled with food and clothing to assist the most needy worker families. The trucks will set off from MAKRO, (Waterval Crescent South, Woodmead, Ext 5 Sandton) at 10.00am. Each food truck contains 200 -300 food parcels and will be met by a designated committee of striking workers and community leaders from the hostels and communities bordering the following mine shafts: Impala Shaft 6 Impala Shaft 8 Amplats Khuseleka Further food trucks are destined to for other shafts during the course of this week, from the University of Johannesburg and the University of Witwatersrand who are twinned with Lonmin, Marikana mine and Amplats Khomanani mine, respectively. This is will the University of Johannesburg?s second delivery after a team from the university delivered 90 food parcels set the trial to Wonderkop, Marikana on Saturday 11 May. The humanitarian effort has been the culmination of a week of solidarity work calling on churches, individuals and community-based organisations to act now to stop the hunger. Solidarity has been forthcoming from the congregants of Northfield Methodist Church, Benoni, the Gift of the Givers, the Democratic Left Front, Marikana Support Campaign, Gauteng and Western Cape, the Socialist Workers Party UK, Gauteng Miners Strike Support Committee and at numerous screenings of the documentary ?Miners Shot Down?, where audiences have donated over R70,000 to date to support the strike. The screenings have been supported by the numerous Churches, Universities, NUMSA, Equal Education, TAC, Right 2 Know Campaign, Equal Education, Mining Affected Communities United in Action, amongst many other civic groupings The monetary value of the convey of food leaving on Monday morning is just over R320,000. Further collections and food donations that will go towards more trucks are expected from Gift of the Givers and the Muslim Lawyers Association (MLA), Palestine Solidarity Alliance, Muslim Students Association, Islamic Medical Association of South Africa and the Media Review Network. We are making advances to the Anglican Church, various synagogues and faith organisations to join the efforts. *Only Together We Can Win* The AMCU strike in the platinum mines is the single most important challenge to the inequality bred by South African monopoly capitalism. It has been going on for over 100 days: we must not let the miners and their families be starved into surrender. The struggle has moved beyond the demand for need before profits to a lengthy all-out fight. It has become necessary for all of us to squarely rally behind this strike movement led by our mineworkers. We need to take note that mineworkers, in particular rock drill operators on the platinum belt, have been waging a campaign for equalisation of wages for underground workers for over five years. This led to the 4-week strike at Impala in 2012 and was followed quickly followed by the Lonmin strike and the ghastly massacre of 16 August 2012. Mineworkers have clearly been radicalized by the Marikana massacre and the response of the state and the bosses to the demand for justice and social and economic equality. They have embarked on what has become the longest strike in the history of mining and to this end they have endured considerable hardship and suffering. Their families and children are going hungry and they clearly now require urgent support. The mine bosses assert that this demand for R12,500 a month is simply not affordable. Recent work by respected economists, show this to be a fallacy, a mistruth. They are inflating the number of workers they employ to cook the figures of how much the demand will cost. Whilst they bemoan ?AMCU?s senseless demands? they continue to pay themselves over 200 times what mineworkers are paid. Amplats bosses have only this week awarded themselves share bonuses worth millions or Rands. Platinum bosses can afford this demand if they are prepared to take less profits, and if the interests of workers and communities come before those of shareholders. AMCU?s latest demand to have R12,500 as basic pay without bonuses achieved by 2017, amounts to an average increase of approximately 20 percent in the first year, and then progressively less each year after that. There is nothing unreasonable or unachievable in that. This is even clearer when it is realised that the platinum mining houses have handsomely benefitted from a 25 percent depreciation of the Rand over the past year. The fact this strike has lasted so long is not because of affordability: it is about power. The mining houses are determined to break the movement for equality and social justice - and they have the government and the state squarely behind them in this attempt. Their very real fear is that R12,500 will become the rallying cry for the entire working class. They fear the super profits that many industries continue to make will be profoundly challenged by this demand. All working class organisations, progressively minded faith groupings and individuals need to now rally behind the miners through providing concrete support for the strike. We continue to call on all trade unions to fully support the strike materially and politically. Broad based support committees need to be established in our major cities and towns. Food collections and money for the AMCU hardship fund need to become the absolute priority in our efforts to support the mineworkers. The University of Johannesburg on Monday 5 May announced they would be twinning with the workers and the Wonderkop community of Lonmin?s Marikana mine. That very same evening they screened Miners Shot Down and in the space of a few days have collected over R20, 000 worth of food, a truckload of food, and a pledge of R10,000 for food next month. Much of this is coming from one church. Wits University is now planning to do the same. If this is what can be achieved at one university, what can we do elsewhere? We have to be bold, we have to think big, but start small. Twin with a mine and adjacent community. Hold collections at your workplace, church, mosque, school, in your street. Get a box where people can drop food for the miners and their families. Find a storage point in your area. Contact us when you have collected a sizeable amount of food. We will ensure it gets transported to whichever mine/community you have decided you would like to twin with. We will work with communities, churches, other faith groups and AMCU to ensure the food is properly and fairly distributed. We must not let the miners be starved back to work. They must win for us all. >From the Marikana Support Committee, ad hoc Gauteng Strike Support Committee and the Miners Shot Down Team Noor Nieftagodien NRF Chair in Local Histories, Present Realities Head of History Workshop School of Social Science University of the Witwatersrand Email: noor.nieftagodien at wits.ac.za Tel: +27 11 717 4266 This communication is intended for the addressee only. It is confidential. If you have received this communication in error, please notify us immediately and destroy the original message. You may not copy or disseminate this communication without the permission of the University. Only authorised signatories are competent to enter into agreements on behalf of the University and recipients are thus advised that the content of this message may not be legally binding on the University and may contain the personal views and opinions of the author, which are not necessarily the views and opinions of The University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. All agreements between the University and outsiders are subject to South African Law unless the University agrees in writing to the contrary. -- 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 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From Mehita.Iqani at wits.ac.za Thu May 22 12:16:36 2014 From: Mehita.Iqani at wits.ac.za (Mehita Iqani) Date: Thu, 22 May 2014 10:16:36 +0000 Subject: [Sugarman] South Africa-Brazil Consumption Studies Meeting, Sao Paulo October 2014 Message-ID: Dear Colleagues, As a follow up to our recent Global South workshop, some of you might be interested in this event (Binational Meeting on Consumer Culture Studies) which is taking place in Brazil in October. It is a follow up to the South-South Consumption Studies workshop that we hosted at Wits last year. And it is a pre-conference for the annual "Consumption and Communication" Congress hosted by my collaborators in Brazil. All details attached. Best wishes Mehita Mehita Iqani (PhD) Senior Lecturer Department of Media Studies University of the Witwatersrand Johannesburg South Africa Room 3064, Senate House Private Bag X3, Wits, 2050 Tel: +27 (0)11 717 4123 Email: mehita.iqani at wits.ac.za My book: "Consumer Culture and the Media: Magazines in the Public Eye" Critical Research in Consumer Culture Network: http://consumerculturenetwork.wordpress.com/ The Newsstand Project: http://www.thenewsstandproject.org ITCH Magazine: www.itch.co.za -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: 2014-Meeting-Brasil-Africa-do-Sul-Call for Papers-vers?o-INGLES.PDF Type: application/pdf Size: 412685 bytes Desc: 2014-Meeting-Brasil-Africa-do-Sul-Call for Papers-vers?o-INGLES.PDF URL: From Sharad.Chari at wits.ac.za Fri May 23 12:14:09 2014 From: Sharad.Chari at wits.ac.za (Sharad Chari) Date: Fri, 23 May 2014 10:14:09 +0000 Subject: [Sugarman] Capitalism from the South: Call for abstracts and readings Message-ID: <0A7507A7310AB24FBD25341240F2A9692AB75B6B@Elpis.ds.WITS.AC.ZA> Dear All, A group of us met over 'capitalist lunch' at Bakubung to discuss various themes with respect to 'capitalism from the south' or 'southern critiques of capital' and related themes. Some of the things that came up: - Southern critiques of capital/ capitalism - Critiques of 'mono economics' from a development economics perspective - Jane Guyer's Marginal Gains and lived economies - Margins, traffic jams as sites of blockage and productivity (marginal or informal activity) - Biometric cash transfers as a way of dealing with identity in the absence of a biopolitical state - Property relations and indirect rule in Africa, minerals and special rights in property - Art markets and the commodification of 'African art' - Lawyers from Brazil and China, and the place of SA corporate law firms - Peter Braithwaite's Regulatory Capitalism - James Hodge (sp?) and critical institutionalism - Financial literacy/ numeracy - Non-capitalist economic activity, Gibson-Graham's alternative economies, the real economy of fishing in Lake Victoria - Environmental thought, Marxism and Capitalism - Jason Moore, Fernando Coronil - Dow Chemical's acquisition of Union Carbide - The Corporation as an organisational form - Dispossession, extraction and climate change - Crises of futurity, capital accumulation and the accumulation of carbon - Pentacostalism and the prosperity gospel, 'winner's chapel', Pentacostal ccupation of old industrial buildings, middle class aspiration - Informal economy, consumption, housing As you see, it is quite an array of themes (and forgive me if they are incomplete, but you will appreciate that they are difficult to summarise!) Yet, there was a sense that it might be worth trying to formalize what it might mean to interrogate Capitalism from the South from different perspectives and across the human sciences. We expressed an interest in sharing readings on these topics, and of reconvening with papers for journal special issues (to be determined by the sets of papers that might logically group together). The idea was to have a workshop on 'Capitalism from the South' sometime in the future, an additional day tacked onto one of the other WiSER/Wits-Michigan exchanges, which would also include a few others whose work is germane to the topic (Jane Guyer, Keith Hart, and various others come to mind, including several former Michigan Anthrohistorians including of course Coronil but also David Pedersen, Marina Welker and others, and Ravinder Kaur - this decision should of course be a product of conversation amongst the working group that emerges from this.) We talked about aiming for papers next year, and a workshop either next year or the following. If you are interested, please send a short paragraph abstract and 5 key readings that from your perspective attend to the topic of 'capitalism from the South' by June 15 to me (sharad.chari at wits.ac.za) copied to Howard (howstein at umich.edu). Please note that whether or not you were at Bakubung, if you are part of the broader Michigan-Wits community interested in this theme, we welcome your abstracts and 5 key readings. All Best, Sharad ________________________________ From: Gabrielle Hecht [hechtg at umich.edu] Sent: Thursday, May 15, 2014 10:17 AM To: sugarman at lists.wits.ac.za Subject: [Sugarman] Toxicity, Waste, Detritus: Abstract solicitation and upload Instructions Dear all, The "Toxicity, Detritus and Waste" group (managed by Pamila Gupta and me) met this week to discuss ways of moving forward with this theme. In the long term, we hope to produce a collection of short, experimental verbal or visual essays (~2000 words), aimed at venues such as Africa is a Country Somatosphere Chimurenga and others (suggestions welcome). Steps toward that goal include articulating preliminary ideas, reading works in common, holding a workshop, and others to be determined. Step 1: sharing preliminary abstracts We agreed to share preliminary abstracts: low-stakes paragraphs merely intended to sketch out initial ideas about what we each want to explore. Capitalizing on the momentum we've built, we agreed to do these by TOMORROW, Friday 16 May. We'd initially thought we'd upload these into Dropbox, but Natasha heroically seized the day and built a WordPress site. So, please follow the instructions below to upload your abstract directly onto our Wordpress site! It's very simple, we promise. NOTE: We welcome your participation even if you couldn't attend the retreat (and thus the discussion). Please just let me and Pamila (Pamila.Gupta at wits.ac.za) know that you'd like to join us. We will ask that you too upload an abstract, but we'll give you an extra week to do it (i.e., until Friday 23 May). Please do pipe up soon: we will create a separate email list for this theme, so as not to burden the whole Sugarman site. If we don't know about your interest, we can't include you! These abstracts will enable us to identify and clarify common interests and sharpen our focus and intentions. We can consider them as provisional, so you need not feel that you're locking yourself in! Step 2: sharing bibliographic material In order to have a common base, we ask everyone to submit up to 5 bibliographic items pertaining to our theme by 15 June. These can be texts, video, artistic material, etc. We will send more detailed guidelines later -- for now this is just a heads up. Step 3: setting a workshop date By the end of August, we aim to have set a date for a workshop sometime in the 2nd half of 2015. Keep an eye out for emails on this point. Looking forward to interesting collaborations! WORDPRESS UPLOAD INSTRUCTIONS A. Overview As mentioned above, Natasha Vally went ahead with setting up our site, and with writing instructions for all of us. THANK YOU Natasha! The intention is to have a very simple website that we can use for collaboration and sharing of text, video, audio and pictures. We will also use it for our longer term scheduling. View this as an experimental space -- we can update and shape it as needed. B. Wordpress Instructions These are really very simple and, if you have email, should not be a challenge at all. In order to keep this fun and collaborative, we need everyone to "buy in" by doing your bit! To add your abstract to the site http://toxicityandwaste.wordpress.com/ 1. Go to the Wordpress login page at https://en.wordpress.com/wp-login.php 2. As your username: toxicitywastedetritus password: toxicityandwastepassword (Note: if you already have a Wordpress account, you'll need to log out of that and log back in with the above username) 3.You will be taken to the Toxicity and Waste Wordpress site 4. On the left you'll see a tab that says "pages", click on "all pages" 5. If you scroll down you will see a page called "preliminary abstracts" and when you hover your mouse under it you will see "edit" click that 6. Now you just need to insert your paragraph into the block, below the ones already there. Please format your text following the ones that are already there: title in bold, your name and affiliation in italics, then your abstract in regular font. 7.Once you are done, click "update" on the right hand side of the page (it is is a blue button) 8. Done! You can view all the abstracts and all other information at http://toxicityandwaste.wordpress.com/ If you are having serious issues, you can email natasha.vally at gmail.com for assistance. But please don't just ask her to do it for you -- give it your best effort first! Closer to June, we will resend instructions on how to add your bibliographic suggestions. They are very similar to the instructions above. Gabrielle Hecht Professor of History, University of Michigan Director, Program in Science, Technology, and Society Associate Director, African Studies Center -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From keith at breckenridge.org.za Tue May 27 09:31:20 2014 From: keith at breckenridge.org.za (Keith Breckenridge) Date: Tue, 27 May 2014 09:31:20 +0200 Subject: [Sugarman] Workshop Assessment Message-ID: Dear colleagues, Please spend a moment in the next day or two completing the assessment surveyfor the first Workshop on the Global South as Idea and source of theory. It might be useful for you to complete the form even if you were not able to attend any of the sessions. There is also a link to the survey from http://wiser.wits.ac.za. Many thanks, Keith (and Anne, and Gabrielle) -- 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 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From keith at breckenridge.org.za Thu May 29 08:57:10 2014 From: keith at breckenridge.org.za (Keith Breckenridge) Date: Thu, 29 May 2014 08:57:10 +0200 Subject: [Sugarman] Outcomes Message-ID: Dear all, If you haven't yet completed the assessment survey on the first workshop please do so now; to date we have a small group of responses and it would be good to have a bigger group. The survey is available from links off http://wiser.wits.ac.za. For the purposes of planning I wanted to remind the list that we have five concentration areas, each with two or more organisers. These groups have different plans for their work, and some of those have already been posted here. If you have questions please feel free to post them to the general list. 1) Toxicity, waste, detritus -- Gabrielle Hecht and Pamila Gupta 2) Capitalism from the South -- Sharad Chari and Howard Stein 3) Global South as Idea -- Achille Mbembe, Nancy Rose Hunt and Adedamola Osinulu 4) Cultural theory from the Global South -- Sarah Nuttall, Jennifer Wenzel and Joey Slaughter 5) States from the South -- Anne Pitcher and Claire Benit-Gbaffou There was some discussion of a sixth concentration area around performance, which seems like a good thing to me. Many thanks, K --- -- 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 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From keith at breckenridge.org.za Thu May 29 09:44:59 2014 From: keith at breckenridge.org.za (Keith Breckenridge) Date: Thu, 29 May 2014 09:44:59 +0200 Subject: [Sugarman] Schedule of forthcoming workshops, themes, places Message-ID: Dear all, My apologies for filling your mailboxes. At the end of the meeting on May 17 we discussed, at some interesting length, the plans for forthcoming workshops and their themes. We agreed that it would be good to be able to support special issue concentrations that emerge from the main workshops, as one means of encourage tangible outputs. That will obviously be budget dependent, and something we can discuss on this list. We also agreed on the following sequence. The dates and names are still tentative. Please do speak up, ideally on the list, if you can see a problem or would like a different arrangement. *Scheduled Workshops* 2. Intellectual property and curatorship in the digital humanities * *Ann Arbor*, November 6 - 17, 2014 3. Public spaces, informality and infrastructures in the desegregating city *Joburg*, Feb - May 2015, ideally to link with Antipode Workshop, last week of March (?), and Coordinating with Capitalism from the South 4. Legacies of the imperial archive in post-colonial history and museums * Linked to Social History after Edward Thompson, Sparks & Eley?, 2015. * & Toxicity in *Ann Arbor* in October, 2015. 5. Cultural studies of science and technology in Africa ** Joburg*, June - August 2016 6. Narrative, visual forms and biopolitics in the medical humanities * *Ann Arbor*, April - May 2017. 7. Textual analysis, performance, visual culture and the state in the making of African publics June - Oct 2017 -- Place? *Currently not scheduled:* * Interrogating Neoliberalism as idea and explanation * The politics of literacy, legibility and expert knowledges in Africa * Vernacular literatures in the making of transnational movements and subjects & Province and diaspora in African intellectual history * The politics of heritage -- 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 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From herwitz at umich.edu Thu May 29 17:22:37 2014 From: herwitz at umich.edu (Daniel Herwitz) Date: Thu, 29 May 2014 11:22:37 -0400 Subject: [Sugarman] Schedule of forthcoming workshops, themes, places In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Dear Keith Thank you for this. Of course I did not attend the second week of the workshop and so was not privy to the organization of themes mandated by participants. I do want to add one thing in the light of what the group seems to have evolved. Namely we have lost the initial impetus for the workshops, namely what we, with you in the lead, submitted to the Mellon Foundation as the intellectual basis for the workshops. Now this is in itself hardly catastrophic. Popular democracy is always about shifting initial principles written by the few (call it constitutional amendment), but the initial idea was a really fine one, and I think of great benefit to serious work in the South African academy and also the American. I speak of the initial intuition which those of us writing the Mellon text had, that while historical studies, and not simply historical studies but also literary studies in South Africa have suffered from an excessive case of empiricism, minute attention to detail, provincialized by a lack of cosmopolitan comparison, no doubt aided and abetted by the cultural boycotts of the late Apartheid period, the American academy has suffered the boundless projection and profiling of theory, which in response to the marginalization of the humanities from public life (especially by the media) in America, has foregrounded its best inheritance from the culture wars of the 1980s, themselves the result of American identity politics (the women's movement, black consciousness, anti-colonial/anti-military industrial leftism, etc...), into a critique of representation which generated a great deal of new and significant theory in the 1970s and 1980s but has gradually morphed into a groundless, contextual-less, floating brand which seldom lands in the robustness of context but rather at airports, academic conferences and all too many humanities centers. This bifurcation between American intellectual work and South Africa, is hardly the only thing going in either humanities worlds, and there are many other things happening. But it is central enough to warrant serious intellectual scrutiny of actual writing/scholarship in both places, which was going to be part of what would ground the workshops, or part of them. Now this project might not appeal to all, but the rapprochment between branded theory (with its particular history in America) and excessive empiricism (with its British intellectual tradition in Southern Africa combined with a strong sense of particular context, represents two kinds of provincialism, which want breaking through (breaking bad?). The idea of the actual study of texts, that is, work done in both countries, seemed a way of grounding what can otherwise be an all-over-the-place conversation seeking all manner of input into everythingness, an intellectual department store in the American mode with the theory section over on the left, the technology on the right, the discount empiricism at the back, the plastic containers in the art department, etc... Call that theory in the south. Wiser has among the most exciting breakthroughs going on already, I mean the edited volumes Achille and Sarah have done on Johannesburg, which are at once highly attentive to the details of context (the city of Joburg), and risk taking in bringing in new kinds of ideas. I might also refer to a predecessor of their fine work in the book edited by Ivan Vladislavic called Blank, which Hilton Judin put together and in which I myself had a piece in 1998. In turn it would be work identifying some really good books from America which break out, retaining interest in context, I mean real interest, not passing or superficial or trendy, and which take risks in the bringing in of new ideas (or the remaking of old) to liven the story or analysis. And speaking to the original theme of the Mellon Workshops, theory/empiricism, in the light of these serious breakthrough books. I have the feeling, and please tell me I'm wrong if I am, that Derek Peterson, and you yourself, would appreciate at least one of the retinue of workshops to follow on this theme. I certainly would, for what it's worth. Best Daniel On Thu, May 29, 2014 at 3:44 AM, Keith Breckenridge < keith at breckenridge.org.za> wrote: > Dear all, > > My apologies for filling your mailboxes. > > At the end of the meeting on May 17 we discussed, at some interesting > length, the plans for forthcoming workshops and their themes. We agreed > that it would be good to be able to support special issue concentrations > that emerge from the main workshops, as one means of encourage tangible > outputs. That will obviously be budget dependent, and something we can > discuss on this list. > > We also agreed on the following sequence. The dates and names are still > tentative. Please do speak up, ideally on the list, if you can see a > problem or would like a different arrangement. > > *Scheduled Workshops* > > 2. Intellectual property and curatorship in the digital humanities > * *Ann Arbor*, November 6 - 17, 2014 > > 3. Public spaces, informality and infrastructures in the desegregating > city > *Joburg*, Feb - May 2015, ideally to link with Antipode Workshop, last > week of March (?), and Coordinating with Capitalism from the South > > 4. Legacies of the imperial archive in post-colonial history and museums > * Linked to Social History after Edward Thompson, Sparks & Eley?, 2015. > * & Toxicity in *Ann Arbor* in October, 2015. > > 5. Cultural studies of science and technology in Africa > ** Joburg*, June - August 2016 > > 6. Narrative, visual forms and biopolitics in the medical humanities > * *Ann Arbor*, April - May 2017. > > 7. Textual analysis, performance, visual culture and the state in the > making of African publics > June - Oct 2017 -- Place? > > *Currently not scheduled:* > * Interrogating Neoliberalism as idea and explanation > * The politics of literacy, legibility and expert knowledges in Africa > * Vernacular literatures in the making of transnational movements and > subjects & Province and diaspora in African intellectual history > * The politics of heritage > > -- > 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 > > This communication is intended for the addressee only. It is confidential. If you have received this communication in error, please notify us immediately and destroy the original message. You may not copy or disseminate this communication without the permission of the University. Only authorised signatories are competent to enter into agreements on behalf of the University and recipients are thus advised that the content of this message may not be legally binding on the University and may contain the personal views and opinions of the author, which are not necessarily the views and opinions of The University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. All agreements between the University and outsiders are subject to South African Law unless the University agrees in writing to the contrary. > > > _______________________________________________ > Sugarman mailing list > Sugarman at lists.wits.ac.za > http://lists.wits.ac.za/mailman/listinfo/sugarman > > -- Daniel Herwitz Frederick G. L. Huetwell Professor Department of Comparative Literature University of Michigan 2012 Tisch Hall 435 South State Street Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1003 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From herwitz at umich.edu Fri May 30 14:08:25 2014 From: herwitz at umich.edu (Daniel Herwitz) Date: Fri, 30 May 2014 08:08:25 -0400 Subject: [Sugarman] from Daniel re: Workshops Message-ID: Dear All Keith asked me to repost my recent note to this email address. Thanks and best Daniel ____________________________________________________________________ I did not attend the second week of the workshop and so was not privy to the organization of themes mandated by participants. I do want to add one thing in the light of what the group seems to have evolved. Namely we have lost the initial impetus for the workshops, namely what we, with you in the lead, submitted to the Mellon Foundation as the intellectual basis for the workshops. Now this is in itself hardly catastrophic. Popular democracy is always about shifting initial principles written by the few (call it constitutional amendment), but the initial idea was a really fine one, and I think of great benefit to serious work in the South African academy and also the American. I speak of the initial intuition which those of us writing the Mellon text had, that while historical studies, and not simply historical studies but also literary studies in South Africa have suffered from an excessive case of empiricism, minute attention to detail, provincialized by a lack of cosmopolitan comparison, no doubt aided and abetted by the cultural boycotts of the late Apartheid period, the American academy has suffered the boundless projection and profiling of theory, which in response to the marginalization of the humanities from public life (especially by the media) in America, has foregrounded its best inheritance from the culture wars of the 1980s, themselves the result of American identity politics (the women's movement, black consciousness, anti-colonial/anti-military industrial leftism, etc...), into a critique of representation which generated a great deal of new and significant theory in the 1970s and 1980s but has gradually morphed into a groundless, contextual-less, floating brand which seldom lands in the robustness of context but rather at airports, academic conferences and all too many humanities centers. This bifurcation between American intellectual work and South Africa, is hardly the only thing going in either humanities worlds, and there are many other things happening. But it is central enough to warrant serious intellectual scrutiny of actual writing/scholarship in both places, which was going to be part of what would ground the workshops, or part of them. Now this project might not appeal to all, but the rapprochment between branded theory (with its particular history in America) and excessive empiricism (with its British intellectual tradition in Southern Africa combined with a strong sense of particular context, represents two kinds of provincialism, which want breaking through (breaking bad?). The idea of the actual study of texts, that is, work done in both countries, seemed a way of grounding what can otherwise be an all-over-the-place conversation seeking all manner of input into everythingness, an intellectual department store in the American mode with the theory section over on the left, the technology on the right, the discount empiricism at the back, the plastic containers in the art department, etc... Call that theory in the south. Wiser has among the most exciting breakthroughs going on already, I mean the edited volumes Achille and Sarah have done on Johannesburg, which are at once highly attentive to the details of context (the city of Joburg), and risk taking in bringing in new kinds of ideas. I might also refer to a predecessor of their fine work in the book edited by Ivan Vladislavic called Blank, which Hilton Judin put together and in which I myself had a piece in 1998. In turn it would be work identifying some really good books from America which break out, retaining interest in context, I mean real interest, not passing or superficial or trendy, and which take risks in the bringing in of new ideas (or the remaking of old) to liven the story or analysis. And speaking to the original theme of the Mellon Workshops, theory/empiricism, in the light of these serious breakthrough books. I have the feeling, and please tell me I'm wrong if I am, that Derek Peterson, and you yourself, would appreciate at least one of the retinue of workshops to follow on this theme. I certainly would, for what it's worth. Best Daniel Daniel Herwitz Frederick G. L. Huetwell Professor Department of Comparative Literature University of Michigan 2012 Tisch Hall 435 South State Street Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1003 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From keith at breckenridge.org.za Fri May 30 15:15:50 2014 From: keith at breckenridge.org.za (Keith Breckenridge) Date: Fri, 30 May 2014 15:15:50 +0200 Subject: [Sugarman] Schedule of forthcoming workshops, themes, places In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Hello Danny, all I do of course agree that there is a real tension now between the careful attention to context and the desire for globally significant theory. Sometimes the problem, as you say, can pull in the other direction, with an almost solipsistic focus on the local. I think that it's fair to say that the regional historiographies all work like that here. My own view on this is that Johannesburg is a good place to write from to correct the sweeping claims of contemporary theory -- Latour, Scott, Foucault. I'm sure that there is wide agreement that attention to detail, and to the locally determined meanings of the details, really matters. And I think we all see the value in framing questions and analyses that address wide audiences. What I'm not sure about is how we can frame this specific question in relation to the work that we've done already. Perhaps it is simply a matter of asking each of the concentration areas to be attentive to the tension. But others will have better ideas, I'm sure. K On Thu, May 29, 2014 at 5:22 PM, Daniel Herwitz wrote: > Dear Keith > > Thank you for this. Of course I did not attend the second week of the > workshop and so was not privy to the organization of themes mandated by > participants. I do want to add one thing in the light of what the group > seems to have evolved. Namely we have lost the initial impetus for the > workshops, namely what we, with you in the lead, submitted to the Mellon > Foundation as the intellectual basis for the workshops. Now this is in > itself hardly catastrophic. Popular democracy is always about shifting > initial principles written by the few (call it constitutional amendment), > but the initial idea was a really fine one, and I think of great benefit to > serious work in the South African academy and also the American. I speak of > the initial intuition which those of us writing the Mellon text had, that > while historical studies, and not simply historical studies but also > literary studies in South Africa have suffered from an excessive case of > empiricism, minute attention to detail, provincialized by a lack of > cosmopolitan comparison, no doubt aided and abetted by the cultural > boycotts of the late Apartheid period, the American academy has suffered > the boundless projection and profiling of theory, which in response to the > marginalization of the humanities from public life (especially by the > media) in America, has foregrounded its best inheritance from the culture > wars of the 1980s, themselves the result of American identity politics (the > women's movement, black consciousness, anti-colonial/anti-military > industrial leftism, etc...), into a critique of representation which > generated a great deal of new and significant theory in the 1970s and 1980s > but has gradually morphed into a groundless, contextual-less, floating > brand which seldom lands in the robustness of context but rather at > airports, academic conferences and all too many humanities centers. This > bifurcation between American intellectual work and South Africa, is hardly > the only thing going in either humanities worlds, and there are many other > things happening. But it is central enough to warrant serious intellectual > scrutiny of actual writing/scholarship in both places, which was going to > be part of what would ground the workshops, or part of them. Now this > project might not appeal to all, but the rapprochment between branded > theory (with its particular history in America) and excessive empiricism > (with its British intellectual tradition in Southern Africa combined with a > strong sense of particular context, represents two kinds of provincialism, > which want breaking through (breaking bad?). The idea of the actual study > of texts, that is, work done in both countries, seemed a way of grounding > what can otherwise be an all-over-the-place conversation seeking all manner > of input into everythingness, an intellectual department store in the > American mode with the theory section over on the left, the technology on > the right, the discount empiricism at the back, the plastic containers in > the art department, etc... Call that theory in the south. Wiser has among > the most exciting breakthroughs going on already, I mean the edited volumes > Achille and Sarah have done on Johannesburg, which are at once highly > attentive to the details of context (the city of Joburg), and risk taking > in bringing in new kinds of ideas. I might also refer to a predecessor of > their fine work in the book edited by Ivan Vladislavic called Blank, which > Hilton Judin put together and in which I myself had a piece in 1998. In > turn it would be work identifying some really good books from America which > break out, retaining interest in context, I mean real interest, not passing > or superficial or trendy, and which take risks in the bringing in of new > ideas (or the remaking of old) to liven the story or analysis. And speaking > to the original theme of the Mellon Workshops, theory/empiricism, in the > light of these serious breakthrough books. I have the feeling, and please > tell me I'm wrong if I am, that Derek Peterson, and you yourself, would > appreciate at least one of the retinue of workshops to follow on this > theme. I certainly would, for what it's worth. > > Best > > Daniel > > > On Thu, May 29, 2014 at 3:44 AM, Keith Breckenridge < > keith at breckenridge.org.za> wrote: > >> Dear all, >> >> My apologies for filling your mailboxes. >> >> At the end of the meeting on May 17 we discussed, at some interesting >> length, the plans for forthcoming workshops and their themes. We agreed >> that it would be good to be able to support special issue concentrations >> that emerge from the main workshops, as one means of encourage tangible >> outputs. That will obviously be budget dependent, and something we can >> discuss on this list. >> >> We also agreed on the following sequence. The dates and names are still >> tentative. Please do speak up, ideally on the list, if you can see a >> problem or would like a different arrangement. >> >> *Scheduled Workshops* >> >> 2. Intellectual property and curatorship in the digital humanities >> * *Ann Arbor*, November 6 - 17, 2014 >> >> 3. Public spaces, informality and infrastructures in the desegregating >> city >> *Joburg*, Feb - May 2015, ideally to link with Antipode Workshop, last >> week of March (?), and Coordinating with Capitalism from the South >> >> 4. Legacies of the imperial archive in post-colonial history and museums >> * Linked to Social History after Edward Thompson, Sparks & Eley?, 2015. >> * & Toxicity in *Ann Arbor* in October, 2015. >> >> 5. Cultural studies of science and technology in Africa >> ** Joburg*, June - August 2016 >> >> 6. Narrative, visual forms and biopolitics in the medical humanities >> * *Ann Arbor*, April - May 2017. >> >> 7. Textual analysis, performance, visual culture and the state in the >> making of African publics >> June - Oct 2017 -- Place? >> >> *Currently not scheduled:* >> * Interrogating Neoliberalism as idea and explanation >> * The politics of literacy, legibility and expert knowledges in Africa >> * Vernacular literatures in the making of transnational movements and >> subjects & Province and diaspora in African intellectual history >> * The politics of heritage >> >> -- >> 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 >> >> This communication is intended for the addressee only. It is confidential. If you have received this communication in error, please notify us immediately and destroy the original message. You may not copy or disseminate this communication without the permission of the University. Only authorised signatories are competent to enter into agreements on behalf of the University and recipients are thus advised that the content of this message may not be legally binding on the University and may contain the personal views and opinions of the author, which are not necessarily the views and opinions of The University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. All agreements between the University and outsiders are subject to South African Law unless the University agrees in writing to the contrary. >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> Sugarman mailing list >> Sugarman at lists.wits.ac.za >> http://lists.wits.ac.za/mailman/listinfo/sugarman >> >> > > > -- > Daniel Herwitz > Frederick G. L. Huetwell Professor > Department of Comparative Literature > University of Michigan > 2012 Tisch Hall > 435 South State Street > Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1003 > > -- 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 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From herwitz at umich.edu Fri May 30 15:44:19 2014 From: herwitz at umich.edu (Daniel Herwitz) Date: Fri, 30 May 2014 09:44:19 -0400 Subject: [Sugarman] Schedule of forthcoming workshops, themes, places In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Dear All Were a single workshop to be devoted to the themes I've recited, and which I think are transcribed (or jazz-riffed) from the original Mellon proposal, I think it would be text based: a serious, careful, very critical study of about five books and a couple of articles, maybe less, which illustrate the theme. Off the top of my head and this is purely for conversation purposes since the list would be equally carefully developed by interested parties, we might carefully read Charles Van Onselen, Jeff Guy, Achille and Sara's book on Johannesburg, Blank (ed. Hilton Judin), and a couple of other things, including absolutely work by Keith himself, and Derek and a couple of others. Around these books, and focused on them as materials, the thematic could be developed. I am not sure what kind of writing component might arise from this, whether it would be critically addressed (short pieces) to the archive we read, or independent. That would have to be discussed. But the point is, this would be a workshop devoted to a specificly chosen archive. And lots of time would be spent on each book or article, not one hour but four, if you see what I mean. That way, serious discussion might slowly arise through the focus of the group involved. Best Daniel On Fri, May 30, 2014 at 9:15 AM, Keith Breckenridge < keith at breckenridge.org.za> wrote: > Hello Danny, all > > I do of course agree that there is a real tension now between the careful > attention to context and the desire for globally significant theory. > Sometimes the problem, as you say, can pull in the other direction, with an > almost solipsistic focus on the local. I think that it's fair to say that > the regional historiographies all work like that here. My own view on this > is that Johannesburg is a good place to write from to correct the sweeping > claims of contemporary theory -- Latour, Scott, Foucault. I'm sure that > there is wide agreement that attention to detail, and to the locally > determined meanings of the details, really matters. And I think we all > see the value in framing questions and analyses that address wide > audiences. What I'm not sure about is how we can frame this specific > question in relation to the work that we've done already. Perhaps it is > simply a matter of asking each of the concentration areas to be attentive > to the tension. But others will have better ideas, I'm sure. > > K > > > On Thu, May 29, 2014 at 5:22 PM, Daniel Herwitz wrote: > >> Dear Keith >> >> Thank you for this. Of course I did not attend the second week of the >> workshop and so was not privy to the organization of themes mandated by >> participants. I do want to add one thing in the light of what the group >> seems to have evolved. Namely we have lost the initial impetus for the >> workshops, namely what we, with you in the lead, submitted to the Mellon >> Foundation as the intellectual basis for the workshops. Now this is in >> itself hardly catastrophic. Popular democracy is always about shifting >> initial principles written by the few (call it constitutional amendment), >> but the initial idea was a really fine one, and I think of great benefit to >> serious work in the South African academy and also the American. I speak of >> the initial intuition which those of us writing the Mellon text had, that >> while historical studies, and not simply historical studies but also >> literary studies in South Africa have suffered from an excessive case of >> empiricism, minute attention to detail, provincialized by a lack of >> cosmopolitan comparison, no doubt aided and abetted by the cultural >> boycotts of the late Apartheid period, the American academy has suffered >> the boundless projection and profiling of theory, which in response to the >> marginalization of the humanities from public life (especially by the >> media) in America, has foregrounded its best inheritance from the culture >> wars of the 1980s, themselves the result of American identity politics (the >> women's movement, black consciousness, anti-colonial/anti-military >> industrial leftism, etc...), into a critique of representation which >> generated a great deal of new and significant theory in the 1970s and 1980s >> but has gradually morphed into a groundless, contextual-less, floating >> brand which seldom lands in the robustness of context but rather at >> airports, academic conferences and all too many humanities centers. This >> bifurcation between American intellectual work and South Africa, is hardly >> the only thing going in either humanities worlds, and there are many other >> things happening. But it is central enough to warrant serious intellectual >> scrutiny of actual writing/scholarship in both places, which was going to >> be part of what would ground the workshops, or part of them. Now this >> project might not appeal to all, but the rapprochment between branded >> theory (with its particular history in America) and excessive empiricism >> (with its British intellectual tradition in Southern Africa combined with a >> strong sense of particular context, represents two kinds of provincialism, >> which want breaking through (breaking bad?). The idea of the actual study >> of texts, that is, work done in both countries, seemed a way of grounding >> what can otherwise be an all-over-the-place conversation seeking all manner >> of input into everythingness, an intellectual department store in the >> American mode with the theory section over on the left, the technology on >> the right, the discount empiricism at the back, the plastic containers in >> the art department, etc... Call that theory in the south. Wiser has among >> the most exciting breakthroughs going on already, I mean the edited volumes >> Achille and Sarah have done on Johannesburg, which are at once highly >> attentive to the details of context (the city of Joburg), and risk taking >> in bringing in new kinds of ideas. I might also refer to a predecessor of >> their fine work in the book edited by Ivan Vladislavic called Blank, which >> Hilton Judin put together and in which I myself had a piece in 1998. In >> turn it would be work identifying some really good books from America which >> break out, retaining interest in context, I mean real interest, not passing >> or superficial or trendy, and which take risks in the bringing in of new >> ideas (or the remaking of old) to liven the story or analysis. And speaking >> to the original theme of the Mellon Workshops, theory/empiricism, in the >> light of these serious breakthrough books. I have the feeling, and please >> tell me I'm wrong if I am, that Derek Peterson, and you yourself, would >> appreciate at least one of the retinue of workshops to follow on this >> theme. I certainly would, for what it's worth. >> >> Best >> >> Daniel >> >> >> On Thu, May 29, 2014 at 3:44 AM, Keith Breckenridge < >> keith at breckenridge.org.za> wrote: >> >>> Dear all, >>> >>> My apologies for filling your mailboxes. >>> >>> At the end of the meeting on May 17 we discussed, at some interesting >>> length, the plans for forthcoming workshops and their themes. We agreed >>> that it would be good to be able to support special issue concentrations >>> that emerge from the main workshops, as one means of encourage tangible >>> outputs. That will obviously be budget dependent, and something we can >>> discuss on this list. >>> >>> We also agreed on the following sequence. The dates and names are >>> still tentative. Please do speak up, ideally on the list, if you can see a >>> problem or would like a different arrangement. >>> >>> *Scheduled Workshops* >>> >>> 2. Intellectual property and curatorship in the digital humanities >>> * *Ann Arbor*, November 6 - 17, 2014 >>> >>> 3. Public spaces, informality and infrastructures in the desegregating >>> city >>> *Joburg*, Feb - May 2015, ideally to link with Antipode Workshop, last >>> week of March (?), and Coordinating with Capitalism from the South >>> >>> 4. Legacies of the imperial archive in post-colonial history and museums >>> * Linked to Social History after Edward Thompson, Sparks & Eley?, 2015. >>> * & Toxicity in *Ann Arbor* in October, 2015. >>> >>> 5. Cultural studies of science and technology in Africa >>> ** Joburg*, June - August 2016 >>> >>> 6. Narrative, visual forms and biopolitics in the medical humanities >>> * *Ann Arbor*, April - May 2017. >>> >>> 7. Textual analysis, performance, visual culture and the state in the >>> making of African publics >>> June - Oct 2017 -- Place? >>> >>> *Currently not scheduled:* >>> * Interrogating Neoliberalism as idea and explanation >>> * The politics of literacy, legibility and expert knowledges in Africa >>> * Vernacular literatures in the making of transnational movements and >>> subjects & Province and diaspora in African intellectual history >>> * The politics of heritage >>> >>> -- >>> 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 >>> >>> This communication is intended for the addressee only. It is confidential. If you have received this communication in error, please notify us immediately and destroy the original message. You may not copy or disseminate this communication without the permission of the University. Only authorised signatories are competent to enter into agreements on behalf of the University and recipients are thus advised that the content of this message may not be legally binding on the University and may contain the personal views and opinions of the author, which are not necessarily the views and opinions of The University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. All agreements between the University and outsiders are subject to South African Law unless the University agrees in writing to the contrary. >>> >>> >>> _______________________________________________ >>> Sugarman mailing list >>> Sugarman at lists.wits.ac.za >>> http://lists.wits.ac.za/mailman/listinfo/sugarman >>> >>> >> >> >> -- >> Daniel Herwitz >> Frederick G. L. Huetwell Professor >> Department of Comparative Literature >> University of Michigan >> 2012 Tisch Hall >> 435 South State Street >> Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1003 >> >> > > > -- > 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 > -- Daniel Herwitz Frederick G. L. Huetwell Professor Department of Comparative Literature University of Michigan 2012 Tisch Hall 435 South State Street Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1003 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From pitchera at umich.edu Fri May 30 16:18:54 2014 From: pitchera at umich.edu (Anne Pitcher) Date: Fri, 30 May 2014 10:18:54 -0400 Subject: [Sugarman] Schedule of forthcoming workshops, themes, places In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: I'm assuming that with Danny's two posts we are now using the list as a discussion forum. That being the case, let me say that as one of the grant writers, I agree with Danny that it would be useful to engage more seriously with one of the core themes of the grant. As I understand it, one of our goals was to figure out how to bring theoretical and empirical work on both sides of the Atlantic into better dialogue with each other and in so doing, to foster inter-disciplinary conversations between scholars who identify more strongly with the humanities and those who are more firmly connected to the social sciences (although I discovered to my delight that at Wits, the School of Social Sciences is in the Faculty of the Humanities). But I don't think that reading the 5 or so books that Danny suggests will get us there. What I loved about the Global South conference was that it was not only inter-disciplinary but transnational and polycentric. It was interesting to find that South African academia had moved beyond the narrow ( possibly necessary?) parochialism of the anti-apartheid and immediate post-apartheid period and was finally looking to other paradigms, problems, and trajectories in other places including India, Brazil but also Mozambique, the DRC, Angola, etc. or Kinshasa, Luanda, etc. I therefore think that any conversation or any texts that engage with theory and empiricism must be transdisciplinary and comparative; transurban, cross national, multi-local, multi-ethnic. ap Anne Pitcher Professor of African Studies and Political Science Faculty Associate, Center for Political Studies University of Michigan 4700 Haven Hall 505 S. State Street Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1045 From: Daniel Herwitz Date: Friday, May 30, 2014 9:44 AM To: Keith Breckenridge Cc: Subject: Re: [Sugarman] Schedule of forthcoming workshops, themes, places Dear All Were a single workshop to be devoted to the themes I've recited, and which I think are transcribed (or jazz-riffed) from the original Mellon proposal, I think it would be text based: a serious, careful, very critical study of about five books and a couple of articles, maybe less, which illustrate the theme. Off the top of my head and this is purely for conversation purposes since the list would be equally carefully developed by interested parties, we might carefully read Charles Van Onselen, Jeff Guy, Achille and Sara's book on Johannesburg, Blank (ed. Hilton Judin), and a couple of other things, including absolutely work by Keith himself, and Derek and a couple of others. Around these books, and focused on them as materials, the thematic could be developed. I am not sure what kind of writing component might arise from this, whether it would be critically addressed (short pieces) to the archive we read, or independent. That would have to be discussed. But the point is, this would be a workshop devoted to a specificly chosen archive. And lots of time would be spent on each book or article, not one hour but four, if you see what I mean. That way, serious discussion might slowly arise through the focus of the group involved. Best Daniel On Fri, May 30, 2014 at 9:15 AM, Keith Breckenridge wrote: > Hello Danny, all > > I do of course agree that there is a real tension now between the careful > attention to context and the desire for globally significant theory. > Sometimes the problem, as you say, can pull in the other direction, with an > almost solipsistic focus on the local. I think that it's fair to say that > the regional historiographies all work like that here. My own view on this is > that Johannesburg is a good place to write from to correct the sweeping claims > of contemporary theory -- Latour, Scott, Foucault. I'm sure that there is > wide agreement that attention to detail, and to the locally determined > meanings of the details, really matters. And I think we all see the value in > framing questions and analyses that address wide audiences. What I'm not > sure about is how we can frame this specific question in relation to the work > that we've done already. Perhaps it is simply a matter of asking each of the > concentration areas to be attentive to the tension. But others will have > better ideas, I'm sure. > > K > > > On Thu, May 29, 2014 at 5:22 PM, Daniel Herwitz wrote: >> Dear Keith >> >> Thank you for this. Of course I did not attend the second week of the >> workshop and so was not privy to the organization of themes mandated by >> participants. I do want to add one thing in the light of what the group seems >> to have evolved. Namely we have lost the initial impetus for the workshops, >> namely what we, with you in the lead, submitted to the Mellon Foundation as >> the intellectual basis for the workshops. Now this is in itself hardly >> catastrophic. Popular democracy is always about shifting initial principles >> written by the few (call it constitutional amendment), but the initial idea >> was a really fine one, and I think of great benefit to serious work in the >> South African academy and also the American. I speak of the initial intuition >> which those of us writing the Mellon text had, that while historical studies, >> and not simply historical studies but also literary studies in South Africa >> have suffered from an excessive case of empiricism, minute attention to >> detail, provincialized by a lack of cosmopolitan comparison, no doubt aided >> and abetted by the cultural boycotts of the late Apartheid period, the >> American academy has suffered the boundless projection and profiling of >> theory, which in response to the marginalization of the humanities from >> public life (especially by the media) in America, has foregrounded its best >> inheritance from the culture wars of the 1980s, themselves the result of >> American identity politics (the women's movement, black consciousness, >> anti-colonial/anti-military industrial leftism, etc...), into a critique of >> representation which generated a great deal of new and significant theory in >> the 1970s and 1980s but has gradually morphed into a groundless, >> contextual-less, floating brand which seldom lands in the robustness of >> context but rather at airports, academic conferences and all too many >> humanities centers. This bifurcation between American intellectual work and >> South Africa, is hardly the only thing going in either humanities worlds, and >> there are many other things happening. But it is central enough to warrant >> serious intellectual scrutiny of actual writing/scholarship in both places, >> which was going to be part of what would ground the workshops, or part of >> them. Now this project might not appeal to all, but the rapprochment between >> branded theory (with its particular history in America) and excessive >> empiricism (with its British intellectual tradition in Southern Africa >> combined with a strong sense of particular context, represents two kinds of >> provincialism, which want breaking through (breaking bad?). The idea of the >> actual study of texts, that is, work done in both countries, seemed a way of >> grounding what can otherwise be an all-over-the-place conversation seeking >> all manner of input into everythingness, an intellectual department store in >> the American mode with the theory section over on the left, the technology on >> the right, the discount empiricism at the back, the plastic containers in the >> art department, etc... Call that theory in the south. Wiser has among the >> most exciting breakthroughs going on already, I mean the edited volumes >> Achille and Sarah have done on Johannesburg, which are at once highly >> attentive to the details of context (the city of Joburg), and risk taking in >> bringing in new kinds of ideas. I might also refer to a predecessor of their >> fine work in the book edited by Ivan Vladislavic called Blank, which Hilton >> Judin put together and in which I myself had a piece in 1998. In turn it >> would be work identifying some really good books from America which break >> out, retaining interest in context, I mean real interest, not passing or >> superficial or trendy, and which take risks in the bringing in of new ideas >> (or the remaking of old) to liven the story or analysis. And speaking to the >> original theme of the Mellon Workshops, theory/empiricism, in the light of >> these serious breakthrough books. I have the feeling, and please tell me I'm >> wrong if I am, that Derek Peterson, and you yourself, would appreciate at >> least one of the retinue of workshops to follow on this theme. I certainly >> would, for what it's worth. >> >> Best >> >> Daniel >> >> >> On Thu, May 29, 2014 at 3:44 AM, Keith Breckenridge >> wrote: >>> Dear all, >>> >>> My apologies for filling your mailboxes. >>> >>> At the end of the meeting on May 17 we discussed, at some interesting >>> length, the plans for forthcoming workshops and their themes. We agreed >>> that it would be good to be able to support special issue concentrations >>> that emerge from the main workshops, as one means of encourage tangible >>> outputs. That will obviously be budget dependent, and something we can >>> discuss on this list. >>> >>> We also agreed on the following sequence. The dates and names are still >>> tentative. Please do speak up, ideally on the list, if you can see a >>> problem or would like a different arrangement. >>> >>> Scheduled Workshops >>> >>> 2. Intellectual property and curatorship in the digital humanities >>> * Ann Arbor, November 6 - 17, 2014 >>> >>> 3. Public spaces, informality and infrastructures in the desegregating city >>> Joburg, Feb - May 2015, ideally to link with Antipode Workshop, last week of >>> March (?), and Coordinating with Capitalism from the South >>> >>> 4. Legacies of the imperial archive in post-colonial history and museums >>> * Linked to Social History after Edward Thompson, Sparks & Eley?, 2015. >>> * & Toxicity in Ann Arbor in October, 2015. >>> >>> 5. Cultural studies of science and technology in Africa >>> * Joburg, June - August 2016 >>> >>> 6. Narrative, visual forms and biopolitics in the medical humanities >>> * Ann Arbor, April - May 2017. >>> >>> 7. Textual analysis, performance, visual culture and the state in the >>> making of African publics >>> June - Oct 2017 -- Place? >>> >>> Currently not scheduled: >>> * Interrogating Neoliberalism as idea and explanation >>> * The politics of literacy, legibility and expert knowledges in Africa >>> * Vernacular literatures in the making of transnational movements and >>> subjects & Province and diaspora in African intellectual history >>> * The politics of heritage >>> >>> -- >>> 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 >>> >>> This communication is intended for the addressee only. It is confidential. >>> If you have received this communication in error, please notify us >>> immediately and destroy the original message. You may not copy or >>> disseminate this communication without the permission of the University. >>> Only authorised signatories are competent to enter into agreements on behalf >>> of the University and recipients are thus advised that the content of this >>> message may not be legally binding on the University and may contain the >>> personal views and opinions of the author, which are not necessarily the >>> views and opinions of The University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. All >>> agreements between the University and outsiders are subject to South African >>> Law unless the University agrees in writing to the contrary. >>> >>> _______________________________________________ >>> Sugarman mailing list >>> Sugarman at lists.wits.ac.za >>> http://lists.wits.ac.za/mailman/listinfo/sugarman >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> -- >>> Daniel Herwitz >>> Frederick G. L. Huetwell Professor >>> Department of Comparative Literature >>> University of Michigan >>> 2012 Tisch Hall >>> 435 South State Street >>> Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1003 >>> >> >> >> >> -- >> 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 > > > > -- > Daniel Herwitz > Frederick G. L. Huetwell Professor > Department of Comparative Literature > University of Michigan > 2012 Tisch Hall > 435 South State Street > Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1003 > > This communication is intended for the addressee only. It is confidential. If > you have received this communication in error, please notify us immediately > and destroy the original message. You may not copy or disseminate this > communication without the permission of the University. Only authorised > signatories are competent to enter into agreements on behalf of the University > and recipients are thus advised that the content of this message may not be > legally binding on the University and may contain the personal views and > opinions of the author, which are not necessarily the views and opinions of > The University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. All agreements between the > University and outsiders are subject to South African Law unless the > University agrees in writing to the contrary. > _______________________________________________ > Sugarman mailing list > Sugarman at lists.wits.ac.za > http://lists.wits.ac.za/mailman/listinfo/sugarman > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: