2009-2010 Events
- Title: Archive, Museum, and the Safe House of Language
- Host Department: Institute for the Humanities
- Date: 12/03/2009 - 12/03/2009
- Time: 8:30 AM - 4:30 PM
- Location: 202 S. Thayer, room 2022
- Contact Information: 734-936-3518
- Description: The University of Michigan Institute for the Humanities explores the issue of the colonial archive in relation to that of the colonial museum in the conference “Archive, Museum, and the Safe House of Language.”
- Detailed Information:
The conference derives from an exhibition the institute is mounting by University of Cape Town artist and writer Pippa Skotnes, based on her research in the Lucy Lloyd Archive from the Cape. In that archive, Skotnes discovered a dictionary from 1873 of a now-extinct “Bushmen.” She has constructed a magnificent multi-media exhibition of documentation, sculpture, and text. This conference brings six notable scholars together to address the issue of the colonial archive and museum in ways that challenge the kind, category, and historiographic inheritances of both. The conference will be followed by the reception for Skotnes's Exhibit “Book of Iterations,” 6:00pm, Institute for the Humanities Gallery, 202 S. Thayer.
Conference Schedule
Refreshments (8:30am)
Introduction, Daniel Herwitz, director, Institute for the Humanities (8:45am)
David Bunn, University of Witwatersrand, South Africa (9:00am)
"Is the Pose Death? On the Longue Durée of the Diorama"
Jean Hebrard, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, France (10:00am)
"An Enslaved Baby Named Souffrance (pain): History of Slavery and Paucity of Documents"
Ian Baucom, Duke University (11:00am)
"Reading a Letter: Vermeer, Van Riebeeck and the Archives of the Atlantic"
Break (noon)
Hlonipha Mokoena, Columbia University (1:00pm)
“The Author in the Archive: Magema Fuze, Bilingual Print Journalism and the Making of a Self-Archive”
Pippa Skotnes, University of Cape Town, South Africa (2:00pm)
"Carnal-House of Words: Curating a Bushman Archive"
Carolyn Hamilton, University of Cape Town, South Africa (3:00pm)
"Entangled Inheritances Part One: The Public Life of the Colonial Archive"
Panel Discussion (4:00-4:30pm)For information on the exhibit "Book of Iterations" by Pippa Skotnes, as well as the exhibit reception on December 3, 6-8pm, click here.
