The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

Beyond these specific instances, more generally my historical practice as an academic
and public intellectual has found expression through a range of publications, and
conference and workshop presentations in a range of forums, 4 and in ongoing
networking that has occurred across a range of academic and public institutions in the
pursuit of the construction of an enabling, critical public sphere. These forums have
drawn academics, museum and heritage professionals and an emerging layer of
heritage activists into ongoing discussions and debates on a range of issues, from the
cultural politics of national heritage, the possibilities and limits of museum
transformation, the enabling and limiting consequences of heritage transformation
through the efforts of consultants, and the prospects and challenges of building
community museums. 5
Since the 1990s, I found myself as a participant in the policy making, heritage
producing and aesthetic work of a range of heritage institutions and museums that
enabled me to have a special vantage point in the interstitial spaces between the
academy and the public domain, from which to view a range of transformations and
knowledge transactions in public culture. The opportunities to work in these public
history spaces constituted a significant influence on the theoretical and methodological
shape of this dissertation. One aspect of this work involved thinking about the cultural
politics of the resistance biography and life history work that had emerged in the
public domain. Indeed, as will be seen, far from being merely a researcher who has
4 I have presented papers either individually or jointly with my colleagues in workshops, forums
and conferences convened by the Mayibuye Centre, the South African Museums Association, the
South African Museum the McGregor Museum, BLAC as well as through initiatives in heritage
networking and training such as the South African National Cultural Heritage Training
Programme convened under the auspices of Michigan State University. A special forum on
memory, convened in Cape Town by Bogumil Jewsiewicki of Université Laval (Quebec) in 2000
enabled South African academics and public scholars to engage with each other and with scholars
from elsewhere in Africa and other parts of the world. I have cited a sample of these papers in the
bibliography of this dissertation.
5 The networks that have emerged from these engagements have not been insignificant, and in the
early 2000s, were most productively forged around a collaborative exchange programme in the
Institutions of Public Culture, facilitated by the Center for the Study of Public Scholarship at
Emory University.
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