The current tendency to construct District Six — and other such heritage sites — as an idyllic, almost childishly innocent and egalitarian society must be rigorously interrogated. Paraphrasing theorist Walter Benjamin, teacher and cultural activist Andre Marais remarked that such ‘fantasy and absurdity [in heritage practice] could lead to future atrocity”. Furthermore, if ‘District Six was becoming South Africa’s fairyland, then likewise Robben Island was becoming its Graceland”. Countering this position was celebrated Cape Town librarian and District Six museum patron Vincent Kolbe, who held that the positive narration of the District Six story by its former inhabitants was a necessary process of empowerment, not to be so easily derided and dismissed, but rather more central to the general heritage project.
This and numerous other presentations covering the progress of public archives, photographic collections, exhibitions and the contribution (or not) of the Truth and Reconcilation Commission to public culture, drew strong responses, inputs and provocative debate from a diverse range of academics, museum professionals, history and heritage students, artists, photographers and others at the second annual Transactions of Public Culture Workshop, held at Cape Town’s Iziko Rust-en-Vreugd museum on January 10 and 11.
The workshop is part of a collaborative programme between South African public culture institutions and the Centre for the Study of Public Scholarship (CSPS) at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, that brings together academics, with practising scholars and professionals in public culture institutions. ‘The purpose of this workshop is to explore the domains of history and heritage, the relations, transactions and flows that occur between these terrains and also their relationship to the state,” says founder member Ceraj Rassool of the University of Western Cape and the District Six museum. ‘We also examine the flows and transitions between the academy and the public domain, assuming a basic position that questions the idea that the academy is the inherent knowledge authority.”
The programme has been in existence since 2001 and was conceived when Professor Ivan Karp and his wife, anthropologist Cory Katz, both co-directors of the CSPS, visited South Africa in 1999 to attend the South African Museums Association conference in Heidelberg. They also undertook museum tours and spoke to many South African museum professionals and academics. Karp is a former Smithsonian curator for African culture who edited two influential books about museums and cultural practices: Museums and Communities and Exhibiting Culture. ‘We discovered a number of people who were trying to transform their institutions with extraordinary creative ideas, but were largely dealing with infrastructural crises. Yet the ironic legacy of apartheid had left the country with the most developed museum sector on the continent,” says Karp.
Shortly thereafter they went about establishing the programme. Karp and Katz visited the Rockefeller Foundation in New York to convince it to invest in a new organisation that would refocus priorities and examine new partnership models.
The CSPS in Emory’s graduate school of arts and sciences is the United States host and is responsible for the programme’s administration. The management of the programme is shared between an Emory committee that includes representatives from the Atlanta History Centre, the Smithsonian museum and the Michael C Carlos museum, and a Cape Town-based committee that includes Iziko Museums, the Robben Island museum, the District Six museum, the Universities of the Western Cape and Cape Town. The programme has a three-year grant from Rockefeller and its core activity consists of research fellowships and three full-year ‘studentships” offered to South African scholars or professional practitioners in public culture institutions. (Application deadline for the current cycle is March 28.)
‘It was a challenging, stimulating, focused and well-supported programme,” says Natasha Becker, a past research fellow who recently completed her master’s degree in 1950s visual history at the University of the Western Cape. ‘While American academic culture is very different to ours, there are critical conversations happening over there that are happening here too and the workshop demonstrates how fruitful such a reciprocal relationship can be,” she says.
At the other end of the exchange Karp says that the programme has been greatly enriched by the ‘innovative discussions and solutions coming out of South Africa”. Currently the programme is recruiting for its 2004 intake and also pitching for another three-year grant from Rockefeller.
Post-apartheid South Africa has seen new relationships forming between the academy, public institutions and spheres of cultural production that were previously separated by the apartheid system. The Institutions of Public Culture Programme and its Transactions in Public Culture Workshop promote a futuristic kind of critical engagement on questions of culture, history and heritage, that combines perspectives from inside and outside academic institutions with an eye on the next generation.
For more information on the programme and fellowships, visit CSPS or contact Dr Leslie Witz, Tel: (021) 959 2225, email: [email protected]