Tribing and untribing the archive : identity and the material record in Southern KwaZulu-Natal in the late independent and colonial periods / edited by Carolyn Hamilton and Nessa Leibhammer.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Hamilton, Carolyn, editor.

Leibhammer, Nessa, editor.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Material culture--South Africa.

Material culture.

South Africa.

Physical Description:

2 volumes : illustrations (some color), maps ; 28 cm

Place of Publication:

Pietermaritzburg, South Africa : University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2016.

Summary:

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 repugnant, but insidiously resilient, stereotypes. These volumes track how the domain of the tribal and traditional came to be sharply distinguished from modernity, how it was denied a changing history and an archive, and was endowed instead with a timeless culture. They also offer strategies for engaging with the materials differently-from the interventions effected in contemporary artworks to the inserting of nameless, timeless objects of material culture into histories of individualized and politicized experience. The two volume set make this archive of material culture visible as an archival resource. They also seek to spring the identity trap, releasing the material from pre-assigned identity positions as tribal into settings that enable them to be used as resources for thinking critically about identity.

Contents:

Volume 1. Preface

Acknowledgements

Orthographic and name notes. Tribing and untribing the archives / Carolyn Hamilton and Nessa Leibhammer. Section 1 Mortified, marooned, mobilised : Negotiating a South African inheritance: nineteenth- an dearly twentieth- century "traditional" collections at the Johannesburg Art Gallery / Nessa Leibhammer

Shifting contexts: material, process and contemporary art in times of change / Nontobeko Ntombela

"(Re)discovering the correct history": tradition and custom, the archival record and identity in contemporary KwaZulu-Natal / Grant McNulty. Section 2 Layered landscapes, segregated spaces : Archaeological contexts and the creation of social categories before the Zulu Kingdom / Gavin Whitelaw and Simon Hall

Making identities in the Thukela-Mzimvubu region c.1770-c.1940 / John Wright

The tribal history project, 1862-4 / Jeff Guy

A.T. Bryant's map of the "Native clans in pre-Shakan times" / Norman Etherington

The historiography of the KwaMachi people: a frontier community between Zulu and Mpondo in the nineteenth century / Nokuthula P. Cele

Re-tribe and resist: the ethnogenesis of a Creolised raiding band in response to colonisation / Sam Challis

"We of the white men's country": the remaking of the Qadi chiefdom, 1830s to 1910 / Heather Hughes and Mwelela Cele.

Volume 2. Section 3 Significant (mis)identifications : Forging identities in an uncertain world: changing notions of self and other in early colonial natal / Sandra Klopper

"A paralysis of perspective": image and text in the creation of an African chief / Jeff Guy

Auxiliary modes of collecting: circulation and curation of photographs from the Mariannhill Mission in KwaZulu-Natal, 1880s to 1914 / Christoph Rippe

Ethnologised pasts and their archival futures: construing the archive of Southern KwaZulu-Natal pertinent to the period before 1910 / Carolyn Hamilton and Nessa Leibhammer

The Natal government railways and their productions of "the Zulu" / André Croucamp. Section 4 Archival biographies : "The name of Zulu is now given": provenancing objects from colonial Natal in the British Museum's Christy collection / Catherine Elliott Weinberg

Curiosity and aesthetic delight: the snuff spoon as synecdoche in some nineteenth-century collections from Natal and the Zulu kingdom / Anitra Nettleton

"Knobkerrie": some preliminary notes on the transformation of a weapon into a swagger stick, or sometimes a stick is not just a stick / Hlonipha Mokoena

Using Zulu and losing Zulu: how the Clem Webb collection was undone / Sara Byala and Ann Wanless. Epilogue : We need new names too / Mbongiseni Buthelezi. Contributors

select bibliography

List of illustrations

Index.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN:

1869143396

9781869143398

9781869143374

9781869143381

186914337X

1869143388

OCLC:

988232119