Archives of the Angola-Namibia borderland, 1907-1917: three problems posed by photographs for African historians | 30 april 11h

No dia 30 de abril, terça-feira, decorre o Seminário Archives of the Angola-Namibia borderland, 1907-1917: three problems posed by photographs for African historians .  O Seminário é proferido por Patricia Hayes (University of the Western Cape, Africa do Sul) e decorre em modo presencial, entre as 11h e as 12h30, na sala polivalente do ICS-ULisboa.

Abstract:

The photograph at the centre of this presentation is Colonel de Jager’s address to Kwanyama headmen on 14 February 1917. This assembly and photographic occasion took place one week after a special South African military expedition under de Jager’s command resulted in the death of the Kwanyama king Mandume ya Ndemufayo at Oihole on the borderland between Namibia and Angola. The photograph is put into conversation with other images, archives and oral histories to engage with three problems that often confront historians. The first problem is how to relate the micro-event/s in photographs to larger scales of historical reconstruction. The second problem is the silence of the photograph, and the third problem is the stillness or stasis of the photograph. The paper explores the potential of gesture at a time of transfer of sovereignty to read deferral and continuity instead of silence and immobility.

About Patricia Hayes

Patricia Hayes is National Research Foundation SARChI Chair in Visual History & Theory at the Centre for Humanities Research, University of the Western Cape, South Africa, and currently holds a FIAS (French Institutes for Advanced Study) fellowship at IEA-Nantes (2023-24). She is co-editor of Ambivalent. Photography and Visibility in African History (2019), the special issue of the journal Kronos 46 (2020) on ‘Other Lives of the Image,’ and Love and Revolution in the Twentieth-Century Colonial and Postcolonial World: Perspectives from South Asia and Southern Africa (2021).

Este evento é organizado e moderado pela investigadora Inês Ponte no âmbito do Grupo de Investigação Impérios, Colonialismo e Sociedades Pós-Coloniais do ICS-ULisboa.