After the fire: loss, archive and African studies

ABSTRACT

A devastating fire destroyed the University of Cape Town (UCT) Jagger Library in April 2021, housing UCT Libraries Special Collections and its African Studies print collections. It triggered an outpouring of grief and concern about irrecoverable archival loss of material that carried the designation “African Studies.” This article challenges this perception of the disaster and its significance for African Studies. Moving away from a negative emphasis on loss, it takes a sensitised position that recognises the possibilities for a reconceptualisation of archives, loss and African Studies presented by the fire. It critically reconsiders the relationships between archives, loss and African Studies by taking seriously how archives are permanently marked by the absence of losses that precede and coincide with their production and remain in a state of decay. Building upon a symposium raising these issues, the questions that guide this article and the eponymously titled Special Issue are: What happens when we take the notion of loss seriously as a path for thinking through archives and their relationship to African Studies as a field? How might we read points of connection and disjuncture between the management of archival loss on the continent and the historical losses that structure African Studies?

KEYWORDS:

• Archive
• loss
• African studies
• Africa
• Jagger library
• University of Cape Town

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for the generous and helpful comments on this article. We would also like to thank the Centre for Curating the Archive, at the Michaelis School of Fine Art and the Archive and Public Culture Research Initiative for their support of this publication. Early work towards the symposium, this issue and this introduction was workshopped at Archive and Public Culture Research Development Workshops in October 2021 and March 2022, and we are grateful to Emma Sandon and Nina Liebenberg for their comments, and workshop participants for their feedback. We would also like to thank Himal Ramji for his editorial assistance in realising this Special Issue. This Special Issue and the symposium that it flows out of were funded by the University of Cape Town Fire Fund (discretionary donations) which we duly acknowledge.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Duane Jethro

Duane Jethro is a Lecturer in the Department of African Studies and Linguistics at the University of Cape Town. His work focuses on the cultural construction of heritage and contested public cultures in South Africa and Germany. He serves as an editor of Material Religion and serves on the editorial board of the journal Museums and Social Issues. His book Heritage Formation and the Senses in Post-Apartheid South Africa: Aesthetics of Power is published by Bloomsbury Academic.

Alírio Karina

Alírio Karina’s research examines the historical and political transformations and consequences of anthropological thought, and its relationship to sedimenting conceptions of blackness, indigeneity and Africanity. They hold a postdoctoral fellowship at the Princeton African Humanities Colloquium, are Associate Faculty at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, and Organizer of Mimbres School for the Humanities.