Archives of the Non-Racial

A series of public lectures, panel discussions, book launches and performances

Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism [Wits Institute for Social & Economic Research (WISER)] & Seminar in Experimental Critical Theory (University of California Humanities Research Institute)

Along with Zimitri Erasmus, Premesh Lalu (CHR, UWC) and Ciraj Rassool (History Dept, UWC) participated in the panel discussion, ‘A Dead Archive? Non-racialism’s Demise in Cape Town’ at the District Six Museum on 11 July 2014.

The panel discussion was a component of the 2014 Joint Session of Seminar in Experimental Critical Theory IX, organised by the Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism [JWTC, Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER)] and the University of California Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI). The theme was ‘Archives of the Non-Racial’. The programme spanned two intensive weeks of lectures, seminars, public events, exhibitions and performances. The idea behind the planning of this mobile workshop was to travel to significant critical sites in the history of South Africa’s notorious racial project in order to open the question of the “non-racial”, both in South Africa and in its manifestation in other parts of the world. Workshop participants travelled by bus from Johannesburg to Swaziland, Durban, Mandela’s grave at Qunu, Steve Biko’s Ginsberg, and concluded in Cape Town. At each site, the workshop convened conversations that explored the histories and legacies of racisms in these particular places, posing these histories in relation to broader conversations about the post-, non-, and anti-racisms across relational global

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