Date/Time
Date(s) - Wed - 06 Sep
12:30 pm - 2:00 pm
Categories
**UFC Special Seminar**
Dear friends of the UFC,
Please join Jacob Dlamini’s Seminar presentation entitled,’ Dying to forget: History, memory and the intergenerational transfer of trauma in South Africa’, Hosted by DUT’s Urban Futures Centre.
PRESENTER: Jacob Dlamini
TOPIC: ‘Dying to forget: History, memory and the intergenerational transfer of trauma in South Africa’
DATE: Wednesday, 6th September 2017
TIME: 12:30pm-2pm
VENUE: The Faculty of Engineering Boardroom S4 Level 3, Steve Biko Campus, DUT.
Abstract:
WHY do individuals who did not experience apartheid personally claim to suffer from trauma as a result of apartheid? How are historians to make sense of the anger of the born-free generation—those born after the formal collapse of apartheid in 1994—towards their parents’ generation, as well as the born-frees’ rejection of the political settlement that brought about the New South Africa? Is this anger an expression of a historical trauma? If so, how is the trauma of the past transmitted across generations? Drawing on insights from a range of disciplines, including Philosophy, Psychology, Holocaust Studies, Memory Studies and the Sociology of Emotions, I intend to address the above questions in ways that might help us think differently about our attempts to forge a new nation in South Africa. My talk draws on a range of sources, including the archives of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, to develop an approach that is both grounded historically but also cautiously speculative. My aim is to understand how ordinary South Africans remember histories of violence and how their memories of this violence are shared across generations. How, in short, do these memories become History? What does it mean to remember your parents’ pain of humiliation when you yourself never experienced that humiliation? The project is motivated in part by an attempt to understand how South Africa’s past has shaped the way the discipline of History has developed in South Africa.
Bio:
Jacob Dlamini is a historian of Africa at Princeton University, with an interest in precolonial, colonial and postcolonial African History. He obtained a Ph.D. from Yale University in 2012 and is also a graduate of Wits University in South Africa and Sussex University in England. Jacob held a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Barcelona, Spain, from November 2011 to April 2015, and was a Visiting Scholar at Harvard University from August 2014 to May 2015.
Kindly take note of the venue (UFC Common Room).
Please feel free to share this invitation to others who might be interested.
Kindly RSVP your attendance to fathimaa1@dut.ac.za
We look forward to seeing you at the seminar!