James Sey
The last week in July saw a flourish of high-profile events to launch the new University of the Witwatersrand Graduate School for the Humanities and Social Sciences.
Conceived of as a productive and market-related new way of approaching humanities and social science tertiary education, the graduate school is seen as the flagship of a leaner, meaner faculty of arts at Wits.
The official launch of the school on July 29 set off several innovative interdisciplinary graduate programmes which, the university hopes, will reinvigorate the beleaguered faculty.
What programmes such as the heritage project, gender studies and a proposed masters degree in culture studies (to be offered in collaboration with Vista University) have in common is a rethinking of the role and content of humanities and social science education, and, indeed, humanities and social science knowledge itself, in contemporary South Africa.
The focal point for these disparate innovations is an attempt to institute a way of thinking and debating South Africa’s cultural identity and history in the context of globalised society and a new millennium.
Against this background, the first event to see the light of the day in the splendid new seminar room of the school on the Wits East campus was the launch of the advanced seminar series on July 28. This series of seminars and workshops will extend until November, and deals with the – at first glance – obscure and specialised theme: Refiguring the Archive.
The advanced seminar forum potentially extends the significance of the graduate school concept beyond its institutional university confines, and will, in the best case scenario, give shape and meaning to a number of important social ideas and concerns for South Africa in the months and years to come.
A number of organisations, such as the Gay and Lesbian Archives, the South African History Archive and the Namibia Archive, are participating in the series, especially in the vocationally-orientated workshop programme. Other multimedia interventions in the archive series include an art exhibition entitled Holdings: Refiguring the Archive, curated by Jane Taylor of the University of the Western Cape, and a dance piece choreographed by Sylvia Glasser entitled Tranceformations.
The seminars themselves will be led or contributed to by many eminent local and international figures, including Harvard Professor of African-American Studies Henry Louis Gates, the SABC’s Mandla Langa and probably the English- speaking world’s most prominent living philosopher, and the one most closely associated with the concept of the archive, Jacques Derrida.
The diversity of input indicated by this description points to the reason behind organising the series around the idea of the archive. As a documentary depository, an apparently objective and factual memory-record of a society or a specific part of a society, archives form the grounds on which knowledge, cultural heritage and a national or even individual sense of identity can be built.
In South Africa, if we think only of the strange, sad and twisted histories and records that have emerged from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s hearings, we can see how partial and ideologically charged the existence of an archive might be.
Investigating the very concepts of cultural memory and recording at this point in our history is thus a forward-looking project rather than the historical one implied by the use of the archive idea. We need to begin sifting not only what has been recorded, but asking why certain things have been remembered or preserved and what forgotten or lost, how and by whom.
In a global context too, the same sets of problems and issues confront the preservation and encoding of cultural artefacts and memory, primary in the move from print-based societies to digital ones. It is theoretically possible to turn all print-based documents into electronic information, for example, but won’t this simply further remove access to cultural memory and literacy for the poor majority of the world’s population.
The concept of the archive stands at the nexus of many crucial questions in our contemporary South African and global cultural landscapes. The range of topics tackled by the seminar series reflect its centrality: everything from electronic memory and post modernism to rock art, gay and lesbian identity and the truth commission. It’s a cunning intervention by Wits, and an important one that will hopefully emerge from the confines of the ivory tower.