Carolyn Hamilton

Carolyn Hamilton
University of Cape Town | UCT · Department of History

PhD: Johns Hopkins University

About

133
Publications
10,545
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Introduction
I currently hold the South African Research Chair in Archive and Public Culture at the University of Cape Town and lead the digital Five Hundred Year Archive research project.
Skills and Expertise
Additional affiliations
February 2009 - August 2020
University of Cape Town
Position
  • Chair
Description
  • I currently hold the NRF Research Chair in Archive and Public Culture at the University of Cape Town and host the Five Hundred Year Archive. I am a trustee of the Nelson Mandela Foundation.

Publications

Publications (133)
Book
Full-text available
The notion that societies mediate issues through certain kinds of engagement is at the heart of imaginings of democracy and often centers on the ideal of the public sphere. But this imagined foundation of how we live collectively appears to have suffered a dramatic collapse across the world, with many democracies apparently unable to solve problems...
Chapter
Full-text available
It has been an article of faith in modern societies that in order to live together, we need to talk to one another. The premise is that, through dialogue, communities can mediate different needs, solve pressing problems, decide on leaders and come to some consensus on issues that confront collective life. But this imagined foundation for how we liv...
Chapter
Full-text available
Preprint
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 about practices and events, that predate substantial European engagement. In southern African there are no equivalent discursive materials that predate the European pres...
Preprint
This essay challenges the assumptions that position thinkers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, who expressed their ideas orally and who did not write, as atavistic relayers of oral tradition, and their literate counterparts - often their very own kin - as modern thinkers engaged in public intellectual life. Members of both seemingly...
Technical Report
The Archival Platform was established jointly by the Archive and Public Culture Research Initiative (APC), University of Cape Town, (see www.apc.uct.ac.za) and the Nelson Mandela Foundation (NMF), (see www.nelsonmandela.org) in 2009. This was a time when activism in South Africa, and activism concerning archival issues in particular, was, with a fe...
Article
Full-text available
The long southern African past before the advent of European colonialism remains neglected despite powerful post-apartheid impulses of various kinds for its recovery and celebration. In the last twenty years or so, outside of the specialist discipline of archaeology, there has been relatively little research undertaken to support those impulses. In...
Conference Paper
[Paper presented to the South African Historical Society conference]
Article
Full-text available
In earlier work, we saw the making of social categories in the Zulu kingdom under Shaka, particularly those of ‘amantungwa’ and ‘amalala’, as an example of the development of embryonic ethnic groups. In the present article, we move on from our previous discussion in a number of ways. We reconsider the category of ‘amalala’, pushing back further aga...
Book
The pernicious combination of tribe and tradition continues to tether modern South Africans to ideas about the region's remote past as primitive, timeless, and unchanging. Any hunger for knowledge or understanding of the past before European colonialism remains to a significant degree unsated in the face of a narrowly prescribed archive and repugna...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
[Archive and Public Culture conference]
Technical Report
Released nationally in March 2015 and prepared by the Archival Platform, a joint project of the Archive and Public Culture Research Initiative, UCT, and the Nelson Mandela Foundation.
Book
Full-text available
Uncertain curature is a volume of bold and original explorations of the archive – the past, our material inheritance – and the ways it is displayed, interpreted and given meaning in the postcolonial world of South Africa. This operation on the past – what the authors have called ‘curature’ – can be seen as the postcolony’s way of rescripting its ow...
Chapter
Full-text available
Research and enquiries into aspects of the Southern African past in the periods predating the existence of European imperial and colonial archives have been complicated by the absence of contemporary written sources. One crucial move to address this apparent obstacle has been to make use of material and sonic objects. Yet much of the material conce...
Article
Full-text available
Shaped as much by fractures, uncertainties and changes in contemporary social and political life, the current dilapidation of the South African national archival system is a more complex problem than simply a matter of inefficiency and bias. The paper argues that any attempts to analyse its current situation with a view to changing it, or indeed to...
Article
Full-text available
This introduction draws attention to the value of a parallel reading of the separately authored articles which follow. It shows how a consideration of historical and archaeological research across the regional divide of south-east and north-west southern Africa unsettles a number of disciplinary orthodoxies, notably notions of distinct Nguni and So...
Article
Full-text available
This article examines the establishment of social categories in the increasingly centralised polities of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries east of the Drakensberg. It looks at the ways in which cultural and historical materials were used to shore up ideological claims and how they set limits on what could be claimed. Rulers manipul...
Chapter
The notion that intellectuals have a role to play in social processes customarily draws on Enlightenment ideas that privilege critical rationality as central to the operations of society. In this conception, the use of reason is not confined to experts or educationists in their places of work, but is fundamental to public life. For Kant, the public...
Article
Full-text available
This article examines journalistic practice in relation to the production of debate in the media. By way of examples drawn from South African journalism, we show that the production of opinion, analysis and debate entails a different set of processes from the practices employed in news production. Editors and senior journalists understand the facil...
Article
Full-text available
Why explore the life of an archive, and what might it mean to study its “life” as opposed to writing its history? The proposition of an archive having a life is, on the face of it, counter-intuitive. Once safely cloistered in the archive, we imagine that a record, an object or a collection is preserved relatively unchanged for posterity. Under thos...
Chapter
The past– often the site of contestation, frequently harnessed to projects of the present as their justification or explanation, and sometimes pursued for pure interest and pleasure – is the object of continual public, political and academic attention. But does archive matter? Archive obviously matters to anyone who is interested in what proof ther...
Conference Paper
[Hosted by the Mamma Haidara Memorial Library, SAVAMA-DCI, and the Tombouctou Manuscripts Project]
Article
Full-text available
This article examines the controversy that erupted in 2006 when the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) was accused of banning certain commentators. The ‘blacklisting’ saga surfaced differences in ideas and practices of publicness among the contenders in the controversy and revealed that notions of the public, public accountability and th...
Article
Full-text available
The post‐repressive‐regime South African government has actively convened a public sphere bristling with institutions and policies designed to facilitate public deliberation. However, certain apartheid legacies and contemporary political compromises facilitate the reach of power into the convened public sphere, leading to the corralling of public d...
Article
Full-text available
INTRODUCTION, A new and distinctively post-apartheid historiography has yet to find its feet in relation to the period covered by this volume. Since 1994, when the first democratic elections were held in South Africa, there have been significant changes in the nature of public discourses about South Africa’s past. Settlerist and narrow nationalist...
Book
Reflecting on South Africa's achievement of majority rule, this book takes a critical and searching look at the country's past. It presents South Africa's past in an objective, clear, and refreshing manner. With chapters contributed by ten of the best historians of the country, the book elaborately weaves together new data, interpretations, and per...
Article
Most editors and journalists believe that the media should provide a space for debate about important issues in society, and that space should accommodate diverse views and voices. Public debate is seen as essential to democracy; a way in which the citizens of a nation can engage with issues of common interest, and hold the state accountable to the...
Book
This extraordinary, visual journey documents Nelson Mandela's 27 years in prison on Robben Island and contains previously unpublished images, documents, and diary and letter excerpts, as well as some original notes from the writing of Mandela's bestselling autobiography, "A Long Walk to Freedom."
Chapter
In 1992, in a dramatic address to the American Association of African Studies, the pioneering figure in the study of African oral traditions, Jan Vansina, identified what he considered to be a major challenge to African history which, if not met, would condemn African history to mediocrity and irrelevance in Africa itself.1 It consisted of two part...
Book
Refiguring the Archive at once expresses cutting-edge debates on `the archive' in South Africa and internationally, and pushes the boundaries of those debates. It brings together prominent thinkers from a range of disciplines, mainly South Africans but a number from other countries. Traditionally archives have been seen as preserving memory and as...
Chapter
On 29 August, 1996, Shahina Farid, supervisor of the South area of the Çatalhöyük excavation, drew the attention of the various teams and specialists conducting a tour of the progress of the excavation to three instances of faultlines on the east walls of spaces 106 and 108. Reflecting the earlier discussions of the excavators as they first uncover...
Article
[In the Journal of the South African Society of Archivists, which in 1998 was called South African Archives Journal]
Article
Full-text available
In 1991 David Hammond-Tooke used the opportunity presented by thecompilation of a Festschrift in honour of Philip Mayer to engage criticallyonce more with the work of students of the history of precolonial southernAfrica (Hammond-Tooke 1991). As was the case with his two earlierinterventions in this field (Hammond-Tooke 1985; Evers and Hammond-Took...
Book
A guide for interpreting the mfecane's role in history. Was the mfecane a figment of historians' imagination as Julian Cobbing contends? How large a responsibility do Shaka and the Zulu people bear for the social turbulence in South-central and South-east Africa in the early decades of the 19th century? These are some of the issues explored in this...

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