Date: Thursday 24 September 2011
Time: 15.30-17.00
Place: Room 1.A47, Pieter de la Court building, Wassenaarseweg 52,
Leiden.
Speaker:
Prof. Robert Ross (Leiden University)
Discussant:
Dr. Gary
Baines
You are kindly requested to register for this seminar.
In this seminar, I will reflect on my experience, with colleagues,
of editing the Cambridge History of South Africa, the second and final
volume of which was published recently. I will discuss the various ways
in which historians of South Africa have chosen the plot-lines they have
used and thus organized their material. All are essentially politically
driven, since in South Africa, history and other social sciences, like
war, are the continuation of politics by other means. The most
important, and those I will discuss are, first, around nationalism,
whether British, Afrikaner or “the struggle”; secondly, around social
and economic stratification, both Marxist and anti-Marxist; and,
thirdly, around the changes of social relations and the breakdown of
kinship as the basis of social order. In all cases there are historians
who have organized their arguments by attempting to counter the opinions
of their colleagues, so that anti-narratives are of great importance.
Read the paper
(Adobe PDF)
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