[Sugarman] History after EP Thompson

[Keith Breckenridge]

Dear colleagues,

After many weeks of organisation, the programme for the upcoming Mellon
workshop on "Writing History after EP Thompson" is now available.  An
on-line version of the programme is at
http://wiser.wits.ac.za/event/history-after-ep-thompson-schedule, and I
have pasted the current version below.  Please do circulate this email to
individuals and lists that may be interested in these problems.

Many thanks,  Keith, Stephen, Geoff and Sarah

- - - - -
Writing History after EP Thompson
All events take place in 1014 Tisch Hall (unless otherwise noted) Rationale:

E.P. Thompson was a hugely important figure in the global development of
social history from the 1960s. In South Africa his influence was marked,
reflected in historical scholarship with recognisably Thompsonian
characteristics defined by richly detailed explication of the experiences
of the black working class. Revisionist scholars challenged liberal
convictions about the pre-industrial origins of racial segregation in South
Africa and claims about the colour-blind character of the market, but
structuralist revisionists in the 1970s were centrally preoccupied with
understanding the nature of South Africa’s capitalist transition in the
light of literature on capitalist transformations globally. Early
revisionist social histories explicated the preservation, resilience and
importance of ‘pre-capitalist’ social forms (chieftaincy, oscillating
migrant labour between urban and rural areas). This more comparativist
moment did not last across the field.

Thompson’s attack on Althusserian Marxism, *The Poverty of Theory*, helped
fuel a reaction against structuralist accounts of racial capitalism in
South Africa which took the form of social history emphasising the agency
of the black working class in inauspicious circumstances. With retrospect
this was both a productive and unproductive development. As elsewhere, the
Thompsonian legacy in South African historiography and historical practice
now appears inherently paradoxical: encouraging sensitivity towards culture
and the analysis of class as process, while nurturing a common sense which
was – and in many ways remains – of generally hostile disposition towards
theory. From the mid 1980s social historians were much less likely to
engage with larger theoretical and comparative debates about the
relationships between capitalism, the state, coercive labour regimes, race
and class formation than scholars a decade before. Curiously, the
precocious sensitivity to culture which South African social historians
developed was not facilitated by the kinds of anthropological influences
that were important to the ‘cultural turn’ in Anglo-American scholarship.

Like Thompson, the leftist historians who he inspired in South Africa were
challenged for insufficiently addressing gender and race, and were
subsequently assailed by post-structuralists for alleged commitment to
teleological Marxist meta-narratives and naïve empiricism. This workshop
aims to explore the genealogies and legacies of Thompsonian social history
across Anglo-American, Africanist and South Africanist scholarly domains.
Historians at Wits and Michigan share training and ongoing intellectual
interests in the theoretical challenges of writing social history in a
world where many of the tenets of class analysis have been undermined by
the effects of de-industrialisation. There remains a nagging sense –
underlined by the interest generated by Thomas Picketty’s Capital in the
Twentieth First Century – that the contemporary global predicament
necessitates the writing of theoretically ambitious comparativist histories
employing culturally nuanced class analysis in the mode of the Thompsonian
tradition. The workshop promises to interrogate the legacies, limits and
possibilities of Thompsonian scholarship (and the relationship between
theory and empiricism between the North and South).
------------------------------
Monday, November 16 Session 1 - What has been lost? What has been gained?

*10:* *00am* * – 12* *:* *00pm*

   -

   Jim Oakes (CUNY) "No Such Thing as a Disloyal Slave’: Rethinking E. P.
   Thompson's Legacy for the American Civil War"
   -

   Lynn Thomas (University of Washington) "Agency"
   -

   Kathleen Canning (UM) "The Social in the Cultural: Critical Reflections
   on Experience, Consciousness, and Subjectivity"
   -

   Luise White (Florida) "*Whigs and Hunters* : the path not taken."
   -

   Discussants : Keith Breckenridge and Geoff Eley

*Lunch*
Session 2 - Thompson and African History

*1:* *00* * – 3:* *00pm*

   -

   Peter Delius (Wits) "Thompson's child or a remote relative from the
   colonies? A footnote from a foot-soldier in South Africa's history wars,
   1970-1990."
   -

   Hlonipha Mokoena (Wits) “'The hardness of the times and the dearness of
   all the necessaries of life': Class and Consumption in Bilingual
   Nineteenth-Century Newspapers."
   -

   Derek Peterson (UM) "Nonconformity in Africa’s Cultural History"
   -

   Clive Glaser (Wits) "Thompson on the Highveld? Social History and
   Humanist Socialism"
   -

   Discussants: Jack Taylor (UM) and Stephen Sparks (UJ)

Session 3 - Thompson and Empire

*3:* *00* * - 4.30* *pm*

   -

   Bridget Kenny (Wits) "The 'Lift Girls’ Lament':   Sex and Race in
   Johannesburg Department Stores, 1950s & 1960s"
   -

   Juan Cole (UM) "Crowds, Workers & Millenarians: Thompsonian
   historiographies of the Middle East"
   -

   Christopher Lee (Wits) "Histories without Groups: Thompson's ‘Average’
   Working Man and Colonial Life"
   -

   Discussants: Lynn Thomas (University of Washington) and Prinisha Badassy
   (Wits)

Seminar by Dilip Menon ( 1636 School of Social Work Building)

*5:* *00* * – 6:30* *pm*

"Writing history in colonial times: the space and time of religious polemic
in late 19th and early 20th century southern India"
Tuesday, November 17 Session 4 - Capitalist transformation and the Commons

*10:* *00* * – 11.30* *am*

   -

   Gregory Dowd (UM) "Jacksonian Democrats and Hunters, 1836-1837:
   Customary Rights, Property in Land, and Law"
   -

   Federico Helfgott ( Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos and
   Universidad Antonio Ruiz de Montoya) "Mining labor, communal land, rent and
   moral economy in the Central Highlands of Peru"
   -

   Khumisho Moguerane (Oxford University) "Class, culture and segregation:
   the pattern of landholding in colonial Bechuanaland"
   -

   Discussants: Peter Delius (Wits) and Alex Lichtenstein (Indiana)

*Lunch*
Session 5 - The influence of anthropology: E.P. Thompson as Geertzian proxy?

*1:* *00pm* * – 2* *:* *30* *pm*

   -

   Adam Ashforth (UM) "Revisiting the Xhosa Cattle Killing"
   -

   Robert Blunt (Lafayette College) "Old Age and Money: The General
   Numismatics of Independent Kenya"
   -

   Bernard Dubbeld (Stellenbosch University) "Scales of studying historical
   transformations: divergent roads out of Thompson in African Studies"
   -

   Discussants: David William Cohen (UM) and Nancy Rose Hunt (UM)

*Coffee Break*
Session 6 - Religion & Moral Economies

*3:* *00pm* *– 4:* *30pm*

   -

   Dilip Menon (Wits) "Religion, Identity and Community in EP Thompson’s
   ouevre"
   -

   Leslie Hempson (UM) "The Moral and Political Economy of Measurement in
   Twentieth-Century India"
   -

   Dunbar Moodie (Hobart and William Smith/Wits) "Using E.P. Thompson to
   think about South African history: Notes on a personal journey"
   -

   Discussants: Keith Breckenridge (Wits) and Pamila Gupta (Wits)

*5:* *00pm* * – 6:30* *pm*
Seminar by Hlonipha Mokoena (4701 Haven Hall)

“Zuluness on Trial: Re-reading John W. Colenso’s 1874 Langalibalele and the
Amahlubi Tribe Being Remarks Upon the Official Record”
Wednesday, November 18 Session 7 - Space, property and the environment

*9:* *00am* *- 11:* *00am*

   -

   Rosalie Kingwill (University of the Western Cape) "Kinship, custom and
   class: property relations among African freeholders in the Eastern Cape"
   -

   Anne Berg (UM) "Green Capital, the Aesthetics of Poverty, and the
   Feel-Good Politics of Recycling"
   -

   Robyn D’Avignon (UM) "Ancient Indexes: Colonial Geology and West African
   Gold Prospecting"
   -

   Keith Breckenridge (Wits) "Plaatje's  *Native Life* , the Commons and
   the racial limits of colonial progressivism"
   -

   Discussants: Dario Gaggio (UM) and Sarah Emily Duff (Wits)

*Coffee Break *
Session 8 – Class and Capitalism Now

*11.15* *am* * – 12.45* *pm*

   -

   Joshua Coene (UM) "What Can Capitalism and Class Reveal in the Recent
   History of Imprisonment?: Thoughts from New South Wales and Pennsylvania."
   -

   Andrea Wright (UM) "Managing Unruly Workers: Worker Strikes, Oil
   Companies, and the Development of Labor Policies in the Arabian Sea."
   -

   Faeeza Ballim (Wits) "Capital beyond the Minerals-Energy Complex: The
   un-making of the working class in twentieth century South African
   agriculture."
   -

   Discussants: George Steinmetz (UM) and Bernard Dubbeld (Stellenbosch
   University)

*Lunch*

*1.30-2.30 *
Closing remarks


-- 
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 | Web: wiser.wits.ac.za |
<http://wiser.wits.ac.za>  *Biometric State*, CUP, Sept 2014
<http://goo.gl/nJKK5N> | Co - Editor, Journal of African History
<http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayJournal?jid=AFH>.
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