People’s and Public History in times of dissent and reaction: a survey of fifty years of the History Workshop in South Africa

Salle H004, CERI, 28 rue des Saints Pères.

Speaker: Noor Nieftagodien, Professor and Head of the History Workshop, University
of the Witwatersrand (Johannesburg)

Abstract: The History Workshop was established in the wake of the momentous
Soweto student uprising of 1976 that, together with the growth of independent trade
unions, reinvigorated popular resistance to apartheid. Over the next decade and a
half South Africa experienced unprecedented mass rebellions that culminated in the
first democratic elections in 1994. Influenced by these developments, the discipline of
History experienced significant transformations, including the growth of radical
historiographies and people’s histories, in which the History Workshop played an
important role. This presentation will reflect on how these formative influences on the
History Workshop (of social history, people’s and public history) evolved in the
democratic era which witnessed the emergence of new heritage practices and the
proliferation of liberation histories. It considers how the History Workshop navigated
the postmodernist turn, critiques of oral history, the general decline in the status of
history in the education system and debates on decoloniality in the context of major
changes in the tertiary education system. In so doing, it ponders the future of history
in times characterised by unprecedented attacks on universities as sites of critical
thought.

Discussant: Timothy Gibbs (University of Nanterre)
Chair : Laurent Fourchard (Sciences Po-CERI/CNRS)