•  29
    This article focuses on colonial accounts of the killing of the Xhosa chief, Hintsa, in 1835 at the hands of British forces along what came to be known as the eastern Cape frontier. It explores the evidentiary procedures and protocols through which the event came to be narrated in colonial frames of intelligibility. In proposing a strategy for reading the colonial archive, the paper strategically interrupts the flow from an apartheid historiography to what is commonly referred to as "alternative…Read more
  •  18
    The university in techno-rational times: Critical university studies, South Africa
    with Aslam Fataar, Shireen Motala, Andre Keet, Sarah Nuttall, Kirti Menon, and Luan Staphorst
    Educational Philosophy and Theory 55 (7): 835-843. 2023.
    This concept note was produced for a symposium held under the banner of Critical University Studies – South Africa (CUS-SA) at the University of Johannesburg in August 2022. The opening plenary session was addressed by Profs. Premesh Lalu, Sarah Mosoetsa and Sarah Nuttall. A summary of a paper prepared for this symposium by Michael Peters on the university in techno-rational times was presented as part of the panel. The rest of the symposium featured critical discussion in response to this conce…Read more
  •  18
    This article presents a polemical argument for a politics of digitisation that aims to politicise the archival disciplines while making sense of the conjuncture in which digitisation initiatives are mooted in Southern Africa. It argues for a blurring of the work of archivist and historian in reconstituting the archive of the liberation struggle. It alters the paradigmatic frameworks of the Cold War that have hitherto defined the structure of the archive. The article provisionally anticipates the…Read more
  •  5
    Premesh Lalu's 'In the Event of History' was written in 2000, before the publication of his first book, The Deaths of Hintsa: Postapartheid South Africa and the Shape of Recurring Pasts in 2009, as a preparatory statement for his doctoral study on which it was based. 'In the Event of History' is published here for the first time, lightly revised. While the outlines of the argument of the Hintsa book are clear enough, it is addressed, as it is not in The Deaths of Hintsa, to the field of public h…Read more