Cape Town Quarter
Academic Overview
Course lead: Prof Kurt Campbell
This program offers a unique and intellectually rigorous experience in Cape Town as part of a BOSP course linked to museum studies and public memory in the UK (Oxford-BOSP). It is designed to showcase the perspectives and pedagogies that South African museum, archival, and curatorial professionals have developed and sustained in response to the epistemic and cultural distortions produced by the apartheid system of subjugation.
The contemporary politics surrounding knowledge claims and representation related to the memory-work and memory-making of spaces, places, identities and events in a country as diverse as South Africa (with no less than twelve official languages) has produced both deep controversy and heightened conflict. Instructive examples of these very moments of rupture and contestation between publics on the one hand, and museum praxis on the other, will be used to train students in appropriate and portable frames of ethics, criticality and curation. Stated differently, students will be made to understand complicated ideas that span ‘cultural appropriation’, ‘hybrid objects’ and other high-level thoughts that will undoubtedly help BOSP students in their professional journey as they write, read and create in and for the cultural space of South Africa and crucially well beyond (read the UK) so that they will serve as highly informed critics and researchers with a global perspective of the pedagogy of public memory.
Major Research Themes
Cape Town has, in a unique manner, offered challenges in developing both museums and audiences, post-apartheid, because South African society has, over ensuing decades, endured the challenges of genocide, colonization, apartheid and structural inequality. These have all produced burdensome and enduring legacies. In this context there is a burden on museum and public memory professions to both acknowledge, undo and revisit collections as both a testimony, narrative and record. Participants will be shown how the twin aspects of ‘sight’ and ‘site’ function in South Africa, in the sense that both geography (location) and psychology (curatorial strategy) brush up against each other as seen in selected museum collections and projects. At the start of term, students will choose a collection or curatorial project which is physically accessible to them and will conduct fieldwork location visits with materials connected to the collection of their choice. This might include:
- Robben Island Museum and collection
- The Castle of Good Hope Museum and collection
- District Six Museum Museum and collection
- Iziko Slave Lodge Museum and collection
- The Heart Museum and collection at Groote Schuur Hospital
- !kwa ttu Museum and collection
Crucial to the approach in this course are two major themes that activate the unique art, artifacts, landscapes and museums in Cape Town:
1. The presence of pre-history in post-apartheid national memory
This theme exploits the visual mythmaking carefully developed by the first democratic government of South Africa to work with subaltern peoples and histories to nourish a new image of both the ‘authentic self’ and ‘unified nation’ after decades of colonial rule and apartheid social engineering. The focus will be on the symbols, statements and formal performance of national identity as seen in the various state sanctioned public art projects (The Sociogenic Imperative of Typography: A ‘face’ for the new South Africa - Campbell 2013), international tourism strategies and newly created memory sites in Cape Town. The Mapungubwe collection, Lydenburg Heads, Cederberg Rock Art fieldwork and various visits to museums deemed to be of national importance in remembering past events of trauma (District Six Museum, Robben Island Museum), will be used to train students in addition to many other archives and libraries.
2. Imagination in the museum: art, film and curation as archive and knowledge claim
This intellectual strand will develop an investigation into instances where the official archive is strangely silent and has no available evidence to authenticate/investigate politically and culturally significant past events, and yet these silences are often filled with works of art that become productive by constituting competing readings and possibilities for various events of history not conclusively known. The artist Penny Siopis will be instructive here (Your History with Me: Duke University Press 2025) as will the humanist Premesh Lalu (Undoing Apartheid: Polity 2022). Crucially, selected examples of the creative interventions and performances deployed by artists aligned with RMF will be foregrounded and analyzed for their curatorial-pedagogical value.