Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-wzw2p Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-05-31T14:02:24.842Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Refiguring the Archive for Eras before Writing: Digital Interventions, Affordances and Research Futures

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 May 2022

Carolyn Hamilton Open the ORCID record for Carolyn Hamilton [Opens in a new window]  and
Grant McNulty Open the ORCID record for Grant McNulty [Opens in a new window]
Carolyn Hamilton
Affiliation:
1Archive and Public Culture Research Initiative, University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa
Grant McNulty*
Affiliation:
2Independent Scholar, South Africa
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: grant.mcnulty@uct.ac.za
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

In most of Africa there are written materials from the eras before colonialism that offer a view of the kinds of ideas, cultural life, and currents of political thought, as well as practices and events, that predate substantial European engagement. In the present-day South African province of KwaZulu-Natal, and bordering provinces and countries, there are no equivalent discursive materials that predate a European presence. With colonialism, much knowledge about the remote past was stitched up in imperial and colonial knowledge systems and recording practices. In this paper, we discuss what digital interventions and affordances offer in terms of researching the history of the material used as sources for the remote past, and of releasing that material from distorting or anachronistic colonial classifications and categories. We consider the capacities and significance of digital interventions in calling out sequestered and lost materials, in convening innovative new assemblages of material, in creating conditions conducive to the restoration of neglected details of provenance, in documenting the twists and turns involved in the shaping of materials into sources, and in formally recognizing the archival potential of materials, notably the writings of early African literati, long positioned as being something other than sources and as “not-archive.”

Résumé

Résumé

Dans la majeure partie de l’Afrique, il existe des documents écrits datant d’avant le colonialisme qui offrent une vision des types d’idées, de la vie culturelle et des courants de pensée politique, ainsi que des pratiques et des événements, qui sont antérieurs à un engagement européen substantiel. Dans l’actuelle province sud-africaine du KwaZulu-Natal, et dans les provinces et pays limitrophes, il n’existe pas de matériel discursif équivalent antérieur à la présence européenne. Avec le colonialisme, une grande partie des connaissances sur le passé lointain se sont fondues dans le système de connaissances et les pratiques d’archivage impériaux et coloniaux. Dans cet article, nous discutons de ce que les interventions et les potentialités numériques offrent en termes de recherche sur l’histoire du matériel utilisé comme source pour le passé lointain, et de diffusion de ce matériel provenant de classifications et de catégories coloniales déformantes ou anachroniques. Nous considérons les capacités et l’importance des interventions numériques à appeler les matériaux séquestrés et perdus, à convoquer de nouveaux assemblages innovants de matériaux, à créer des conditions propices à la restauration de détails de provenance négligés, à documenter les rebondissements impliqués dans la transformation des matériaux en sources, et en reconnaissant formellement le potentiel archivistique de ces matériaux, notamment les écrits des premiers lettrés africains, longtemps négligés comme sources et considérés comme des « non-archives ».

Type
Artifacts and Archives Anew
Information
History in Africa , Volume 49 , June 2022 , pp. 131 - 157
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the African Studies Association

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Brenner, Joni, Vorster, Stacy, and Wintjes, Justine, Lifescapes: Six Object Bibliographies (Johannesburg, South Africa: Wits Art Museum, 2016).Google Scholar
Buthelezi, Mbongiseni, “‘Sifuna umlando wethu’ (We are Looking for our History): Oral Literature and the Meanings of the Past in Post-Apartheid South Africa,” PhD dissertation, Columbia University (New York, 2012).Google Scholar
Casalis, Eugène,“Biographical Notice on the Life, Conversation and Death of Manoah, Member of the Church of the Thaba-Bossiu, among the Béchuanas-Bassoutos (South Africa), 1843,” trans. Morelli, Ettore, unpublished transcript sourced from the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, translation prepared for the Archive and Public Culture research initiative, 2020 [1843].Google Scholar
Cobbing, Julian, “A Tainted Well: The Objectives, Historical Fantasies, and Working Methods of James Stuart, with Counter-argument,” Journal of Natal and Zulu History 11 (1988), 115–154.Google Scholar
Evans, Sandra K., Pearce, Katy E., Vitak, Jessica, and Treem, Jeffrey W., “Explicating Affordances: A Conceptual Framework for Understanding Affordances in Communication Research,” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 22 (2017), 35–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fagan, Henry, “Shaping and Reshaping: The James Stuart Archive and the Historiography of KwaZulu-Natal Region’s Late Independent Era,” Archive and Public Culture Workshop Paper, University of Cape Town (Cape Town, May 2021).Google Scholar
Faraj, Samer, and Azad, Bijan, “The Materiality of Technology: An Affordance Perspective,” in Leonardi, Paul M., Nardi, Bonnie A., and Kallinikos, Jannis (eds.), Materiality and Organizing: Social Interaction in a Technological World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).Google Scholar
Five Hundred Year Archive, www.fhya.org, (accessed May 2021).Google Scholar
Gibson, James J., The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Boston: Houghton Mifflin 1979.)Google Scholar
Grafton, Anthony, The Footnote: A Curious History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999).Google Scholar
Hamilton, Carolyn, Terrific Majesty: The Powers of Shaka Zulu and the Limits of Historical Invention (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1998).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hamilton, Carolyn, “Backstory, Biography, and the Life of the James Stuart Archive,” History in Africa 38–1 (2011), 319–341.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hamilton, Carolyn, “Archives, Ancestors and the Contingencies of Time: The Limits of the Inherited Archive,” in Lüdtke, Alf, and Nanz, Tobias (eds.), Laute, Bilder, Texte. Register des Archivs (Göttingen, Germany: V&R Unipress, 2015).Google Scholar
Hamilton, Carolyn,“Recalibrating the Deep History of Intellectual Thought in the KwaZulu-Natal Region,” in Broodryk, Christopher (ed.), Public Intellectuals in South Africa: Critical Voices from the Past (Johannesburg, South Africa: Wits University Press, 2021).Google Scholar
Hamilton, Carolyn, and Leibhammer, Nessa (eds.), Tribing and Untribing the Archive: Identity and the Material Record in Southern KwaZulu-Natal in the Late Independent and Colonial Periods, 2 volumes (Scottsville: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2016).Google Scholar
Hamilton, Carolyn, Harris, Verne, Pickover, Michèle, Reid, Graeme, Saleh, Razia, and Taylor, Jane (eds.), Refiguring the Archive (Cape Town, South Africa: David Philip, 2002).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hockey, Susan, “The History of Humanities in Computing,” in Schreibman, Susan, Siemens, Ray, and Unsworth, John (eds.), A Companion to Digital Humanities (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2004).Google Scholar
Hughes, Lorna, Constantopoulos, Panos, and Dallas, Costis, “Digital Methods in the Humanities: Understanding and Describing their Use across the Disciplines,” in Schreibman, Susan, Siemens, Ray, and Unsworth, John (eds.), A New Companion to Digital Humanities (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2015).Google Scholar
Hutchby, Ian, “Technologies, Texts and Affordances,” Sociology 35–2 (2001), 441–456.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kahn, Rebecca, “Man, Woman, Child: Ethical Aspects of Metadata at the Pitt Rivers Museum,” in Dahlgren, Anna, Hansson, Karin, Wasielewski, Amanda, and Reichert, Ramón (eds.), The Politics of Metadata, Digital Culture & Society 6–2 (2020) (New York: Columbia University Press, 2021).Google Scholar
Kelleher, Christian, “Archive without Archives: (Re)Locating and (Re)Defining the Archive Through Post-Custodial Praxis,” in Caswell, Michelle, Punzalan, Ricardo, and Sangwand, T-Kay (eds.), Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies 1–2 (2017), 1–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mahoney, Michael, The Other Zulus: The Spread of Zulu Ethnicity in Colonial South Africa (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012).Google Scholar
Mayr, Franz, “Language of Colours Amongst the Zulus Expressed by Their Beadwork Ornaments, and Some General Notes on Their Personal Adornments and Clothing,” Annals of the Natal Museum 1 (1906), 159–166.Google Scholar
Mayr, Franz, “The Zulu Kafirs of Natal,” Anthropos 1 (1906), 453–471 and 2 (1907), 392–399, 633–645.Google Scholar
McNulty, Grant, “Archival Aspirations and Anxieties: Contemporary Preservation and Production of the Past in Umbumbulu, KwaZulu-Natal,” South African Historical Journal 65–1 (2013), 44–69.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mokoena, Hlonipha, “‘The Black House,’ or, How the Zulu Became Jews,” Journal of Southern African Studies 44–3, 401–411.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ngubane, Harriet, Body and Mind in Zulu Medicine: Ethnography of Health and Disease in Nyuswa-Zulu Thought and Practice (New York: Academic Press, 1977).Google Scholar
Oldman, Dominic, Doerr, Martin, and Gradmann, Stefan, “Zen and the Art of Linked Data,” in Schreibman, Susan, Siemens, Ray, and Unsworth, John (eds.), A New Companion to Digital Humanities (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2015).Google Scholar
Ramsay, Stephen, and Rockwell, Geoffrey, “Developing Things: Notes toward an Epistemology of Building in the Digital Humanities,” in Gold, Mathew K. (ed.), Debates in the Digital Humanities (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012).Google Scholar
Reader, D. H., Zulu Tribe in Transition: The Makhanya of Southern Natal (New York: Humanities Press, 1966).Google Scholar
Stuart, James, A History of the Zulu Rebellion, 1906, and of Dinuzulu's Arrest, Trial and Expatriation (London: Macmillan and Co., Limited, 1913).Google Scholar
Stuart, James, uBaxoxele (London: Longmans, Green and Company, 1924).Google Scholar
Stuart, James, uHlangakhula (London: Longmans, Green and Company, 1924).Google Scholar
Stuart, James, uKulumetule (London: Longmans, Green and Company, 1925).Google Scholar
Stuart, James, uThulasizwe (London: Longmans, Green and Company, 1925).Google Scholar
Stuart, James, uVusezakiti (London: Longmans, Green and Company, 1926).Google Scholar
Terras, Melissa, Nyhan, Julianne, and Vanhoutte, Edward, Defining Digital Humanities, a Reader (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2013).Google Scholar
Vansina, Jan, Oral Tradition: A Study in Historical Methodology, trans. Wright, Hope (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965).Google Scholar
Watrall, Ethan, “Archaeology, the Digital Humanities, and the ‘Big Tent,’” in Gold, Matthew K., and Klein, Lauren F. (eds.), Debates in the Digital Humanities (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2016).Google Scholar
Webb, Colin, and Wright, John, The James Stuart Archive of Recorded Oral Evidence Relating to the History of the Zulu and Neighbouring Peoples, six volumes, with a seventh forthcoming (Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 1976–2014).Google Scholar
Webb, Colin, and Wright, John, Volume 3, Statement of Mkando kaDhlova (1982), 145–194.Google Scholar
Wright, John, “Making the James Stuart Archive,” History in Africa 23 (1996), 333–350.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wright, John, “Tracking Down the Sources of James Stuart’s isiZulu Readers,” paper presented at the Southern African Historical Society, Rhodes University, Makhanda, 24–26 June 2019.Google Scholar
Wylie, Dan, Savage Delight: White Myths of Shaka (Scottsville: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2000).Google Scholar