postamble: News

Forthcoming Seminar Series in the Centre for African Studies: Producing Africa

How has Africa been produced through different disciplinary knowledgeprojects, institutional sites and contemporary discourses?

This seminar series focuses on questions of knowledge production, and on the role of the university as a postcolonial institution. We want to make the link between disciplinary discourses, the university as institution, and a coloniality of knowledge and practice in present-day South Africa. A central question for us is how we set about producing knowledge in and of Africa outside of the framework of three inherited discourses: colonial ethnography, a nativist or essentialist discourse on Africa, and a form of development discourse which sees Africa as a problem to be fixed. In other words, how do we think Africa outside of tropes of Otherness, essential difference, and social pathology?

As the continent is reconfigured in shifting global geopolitics, economies and imaginaries, so is knowledge of, in and about it. How is Africa, and “African Studies”, being positioned within a contemporary configuration of knowledge/ power, as part of a process of “imperial globality” (Escobar 2008)? What new ways of thinking and figuring Africa – and the disciplines – have emerged as part of resistant projects and dissident critiques; and how have these been institutionally sited? What theoretical co-ordinates and intellectual affiliations underlie such projects? How is Africa being thought in the postcolonial university? On the continent? In the Diaspora? In South Africa, specifically? How has South Africa’s role as regional hegemon been reflected in the realm of knowledge production? How do we write a non-colonial knowledge agenda for the postcolonial university from the perspective of our own time and place?

Intended as a set of provocations, such questions point to an area of critical enquiry and an overdue debate on knowledge, the disciplines, and the university as institution, in the context of colonialism/apartheid and their aftermaths. The seminar series seeks to raise debate, unsettle disciplinary knowledges and engage critically with the ways in which contemporary Africa is being produced.

reGeneration2 – Tomorrow’s Photographers Today Michaelis Galleries, Hiddingh Campus, 27 July to 3 September

The Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town and the Gordon Institute for Performing and Creative Arts will host the international photographic exhibition reGeneration2 – Tomorrow’s Photographers Today from 27 July to 3 September in the Michaelis Galleries. This is the first time the reGeneration project will be seen on the African continent. reGeneration2 showcases the inspiring creativity of photographers from 25 countries at the outset of their careers, including one South African - Michaelis graduate Robert Watermeyer. He is one of 80 photographers selected by the Musée de l’Elysée (Lausanne, Switzerland) from 730 candidates submitted by more than 120 of the world’s top photography schools. reGeneration2 – Tomorrow’s Photographers Today is the second iteration of a project developed by the Musée de l’Elysée in 2005; reGeneration – Fifty Photographers of Tomorrow was shown in ten cities in the USA, Europe and Asia and attracted some 120 000 visitors. Many of the photographers selected for the initial project have gone on to develop major international careers, including South African Pieter Hugo. reGeneration2 – Tomorrow’s Photographers Today is taking place at Michaelis Galleries, UCT’s Hiddingh Campus, 31 – 37 Orange Street, Cape Town from 27 July to 3 September 2010. The gallery is open 10h00 to 15h00, Tuesday to Friday and 10h00 to 12h00 noon on Saturdays. All are welcome and entry is free.For more information contact Nadja Daehnke, Michaelis Galleries curator, at 021 480 7170 / 082 316 5272 /

Nadja.daehnke@uct.ac.za

EE’s ‘Campaign for School Libraries’ wins action from Department of Basic Education

After 12 months of campaigning for school libraries Equal Education welcomes positive steps taken by Minister of Education Angie Motshekga, the Department of Basic Education (DBE), and certain provincial departments. These include:

the gazetting of the National Policy on an Equitable Provision of an Enabling School Physical Teaching and Learning Environment (NPEP), on 11 June 2010;
a detailed response from Minister Motshekga to Equal Education’s Memorandum, containing important admissions, and promises, about South Africa school library policy;
unprecedented steps taken by the Gauteng and Western Cape MECs for Education, in regard to providing school libraries;

None of these steps alone are adequate to the provision of fully functioning libraries in every school, and none go far enough in terms of ensuring provision of all the requirements for a functioning library, including a trained librarian. Significant gaps in policy remain.

However, these steps represent progress, and constitute significant victory for a campaign that has been waged for 12 months, by thousands of learners, parents, teachers and community members across South Africa. With facts, argument, community education, leadership training and mass mobilization the working class youth leadership of Equal Education have proven that the South African education system can be transformed through the hard work of ordinary people.

For more detail read EE’s response to Minister Motshekga, sent 5 July 2010, and read further below. For interviews contact Yoliswa Dwane on 021 387 0022 or dmitri@equaleducation.org.za .

After the world Cup – how can we build on our success? Zwelinzima Vavi`s address to Cape Teachers` Professional Association, 15 July 2010

Social Text: World Cup 2010

Rajend Mesthrie - Great Texts / Big Questions -15 April 17h00 on Noam Chomsky April 15, 2010 - April 15, 2010

One of South Africa’s leading language experts, Professor Rajend Mesthrie, is guest speaker at UCT’s Gordon Institute for Performing and Creative Arts’ Great Texts / Big Questions lecture on 15 April when he will discuss ‘Syntactic Structures: Noam Chomsky and the colourless green revolution in language studies’.

New Call for Papers: Volume 6.2: 'Whose FIFA World Cup?'

Our most recent Call for Papers, for Volume 6, No.2, entitled "Whose FIFA World Cup?" can now be accessed under submissions tab on this website. Submission dates close on the 15th June, for full length papers and on the 15th July for opinion pieces, photographic essays and book reviews.

Imraan Coovadia - Great Texts / Big Questions - Lolita -1 April 17h00 April 01, 2010 - April 01, 2010

Acclaimed novelist Imraan Coovadia is guest speaker at UCT’s Gordon Institute for Performing and Creative Arts (GIPCA)’s Great Text / Big Questions public lecture on Thursday 1 April. He will discuss ‘How to read Lolita’. This free hour-long lecture is open to the public, UCT staff and students and starts at 17h00 in Hiddingh Hall, on UCT’s Hiddingh Campus, Orange Street, in the heart of Cape Town’s CBD.

RoseLee Goldberg - Great Texts / Big Questions 11 March, 17h00 RoseLee Goldberg - Great Texts / Big Questions 11 March, 17h00 March 11, 2010 - March 11, 2010

RoseLee Goldberg, South African-born world authority on performance art, will be guest speaker at the Gordon Institute for Performing and Creative Arts (GIPCA)’s Great Texts / Big Questions lecture on 11 March.

Goldberg’s illustrious career – as art historian, critic, curator and author – has spanned almost three decades and has helped shape the public’s view of live performance as a visual art form. Her book Performance Art from Futurism to the Present was first published in 1979 and pioneered the study of performance art; even today it is considered a definitive text on the topic.

Career highlights include directorship of the Royal College of Art Gallery, London and curator of exhibitions at The Kitchen, New York, the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) and the Guggenheim. A graduate of Wits University and the Courtauld Institute of Art (London University), Goldberg has taught at New York University since 1987 and lectured extensively - at Yale, Princeton and Tate Modern among others. Born and bred in Durban, Goldberg has lived and worked predominantly in the USA, and is currently visiting South Africa as a judge for Spier Contemporary.

Committed to initiating new directions in visual art performance and to providing a framework for its history and reception, Goldberg founded Performa (www.performa-arts.org), New York in 2004. A multidisciplinary non-profit arts organization Performa is dedicated to exploring the critical role of live performance in the history of twentieth century art and to encouraging new directions in performance for the twenty-first century.

Rob Baum, Director of GIPCA, is thrilled to be hosting a speaker of Goldberg’s stature, “Performance art is a discursive arts practice that descends from early 20th Century anti-art models. It is an overt and interactive form, one that is politically vocal and publicly accessible and can change the way people perceive the world,” she said.

Exhibition: Third Worlds: Model Cities

Opening 18 February 2010 at the Michaelis Gallery at 6pm.
Closes 19.03.2010

Third Worlds: Model Cites is a collaborative exhibition focussing on the theme of architectures of urban South African landscapes. The exhibition is built around a large model of an abstracted city of Cape Town, saturated colour photographs and a number of other connected artworks that all investigate how the urban land is constructed. While many contemporary artists have engaged with the city of Johannesburg few have investigated the Cape Town urban landscape.

The ideas behind Third World; Model Cities have emerged through an interplay between two previously completed bodies of work exploring the aspects of the South African built landscape by collaborators. The first is photographer Svea Josephy’s work Twin Town’ which provocatively sets images of sites found in South Africa against their named metropolitan ‘others’, while the second is from the collection of essays published in 2007 ‘Desire Lines, Space, Memory and Identity in the Post apartheid City’ which interrogated the multiple manifestations of heritage in South African cities to which Noëleen Murray, Harry Garuba and Carson Smuts contributed.

Third Worlds is positioned in a new space, a type of ‘third space’ somewhere between these two bodies of intellectual work and sets out to take further critiques of the making of built landscapes and to set these against their associated archives – of landscape painting and photography; aerial photography; architects and planner’s imaginaries through drawings, models and actual buildings; different publics’ responses to cities and places; and through the more performative medium of creative writing, novels, poetry and actual language. For example Tessa Dowling has developed detailed studies of languages and words relating to ‘cityness’ in Cape Town.

The naming of the project Third Worlds is also a comment on the persistence of the term set against global conditions that have increasingly been questioned, yet bizarrely persist in metropolitan understandings of postcolonial Africa. Yet strangely the term survives perched precariously between the binaries of centre and periphery, somehow accommodating fourth, fifth, sixth and other multiples of worlds. The exhibition of architectural models and photographs of ‘Third Cities’ based in which local settlements are combined with those after which they are named to create a new landscape which is somewhere between the two. The model investigates apartheid modernities of Cape Town on the one hand on the other the curious naming practices of so called ‘informal’ and ‘semi formal’ settlements in the Western Cape.

The exhibition may change the way individuals think about the land, and promote greater understanding of the issues inherent in how land is settled, used and constructed by different groups. We hope it will contribute to city- wide debates in the context of events such as the 2010 World Cup and the current proliferation of developer driven initiatives in Cape Town.
The collaborative nature of the project erodes the boundaries between the disciplines of fine art and architecture, language and literature. The collaborators on this project include: Svea Josephy who is an artist and Senior Lecturer at the Michaelis School of Fine Art at UCT, Harry Garuba is an Associate Professor with a joint appointment in the Centre for African Studies and the Department of English at UCT and Tessa Dowling is Adjunct Professor in the Southern African Languages section of the School of Languages at UCT, Noëleen Murray is an architect affiliated with the Centre for Humanities Research at UWC and a PhD student in the Centre for African Studies at UCT and Carson Smuts is a recently qualified architect. Justin Brett, an artist and part time teacher at Michealis and Lorenzo Nassembeni, who is an architect and designer have also contributed substantially to the collaborative process. Shafiek Mathhews and John Coetzee of UCT’s School of Architecture, Planning and Geomatics have contributed to the design and realisation of the project.

Michaelis Gallery
Hiddingh Campus
31-37 Orange Street

Cape Town

Enquires: 021 4807156 or 021 4807111

Niek.degreef@uct.ac.za

CONFERENCE – Time Space Africa: Reconnecting the Continent

CALL FOR PAPERS

CONFERENCE – Time Space Africa: Reconnecting the Continent

Date: 30 September - 1 October 2010
Venue: University of Turku, Finland

In the last decades there has been a spatial turn in thinking in the social sciences and humanities. In various ways, the emphasis on spatial relations asserts that space and place are social constructions relevant to the understanding of the different experiences and histories of human subjects and to the production of cultural phenomena.

The spatial turn has had a major impact on African studies and research on Africa. Landscapes and situated memories have become fluid categories in African studies, as elsewhere. Boundaries, territoriality and sovereignty are redefined and challenged. Violent conflicts and separatist movements often originate in, and thrive on the particular conditions that prevail in borderlands and can spill over the lines that supposedly divide sovereign states. A new scramble by transnational mining and agribusiness corporations for Africa’s rich natural resources is affecting the daily lives of many Africans, but also the political stability of entire societies and states.

The spatial turn can be expressed in simple semantic terms, such as the metaphorical use of ‘space’ and ‘place’ to denote a geographical dimension in the production of culture. On the other hand, the spatial turn is also more substantive, involving a reworking of the very notion and significance of spatiality to offer a perspective in which space is every bit as important as time, or basic social institutions, in the unfolding of human affairs. The growing attention to global relations is perhaps the predominant manifestation of the spatial turn. Global trends intermingle with local discourses and vice-versa, resulting in vibrant new expressions, fusions and hybridizations in culture, language, and the arts.

The spatial turn is, however, more than the recognition of globalization. It represents a paradigm shift in outlook and perspective and challenges the idea of place or space in history as an unreflected category linked to tradition and immutability. In the cognitive sciences, space has long been shown to be of crucial importance in structuring thought and language.

Recent work has shown how deeply culture-specific space is and challenges once common assumptions concerning the universality of spatial concepts. Besides cultures varying between one nation-state and another, cultures may also be at variance, for example, in terms of language; religion, affluence, healthcare, gender relations, level of education, transparency, and environmental responsibility. The space may be rural or urban; crowded or sparsely populated; technologically mediated or face-to-face; ethnically homogenous or heterogeneous; and/or connected in ways that trace to colonial, post-colonial, pre-colonial or new institutional models of governance.

Increasingly, the spatial is seen as something which is more than a predefined territorial container of political life. Instead, attention is directed to modes of analysis which disrupt static and rigid conceptualizations of space. These newly emerging doctrines of space claim that space is not a fixed backcloth to the political. It is rather the sphere of multiplicity and difference, which involves tracing the lines of responsibility towards others, often across territorial boundaries.

While the Conference is thematically open, NAD 2010 (Nordic Africa Days) challenges researchers to reflect in their presentations on the changing conditions, positions and possibilities of the continent. Papers may be submitted as individual submissions or as complete panels. The organizers will group individual submissions into panels according to thematic criteria. Following the tradition of NAD, PhD candidates and other young scholars are strongly encouraged to participate. NAD aims to be a forum for academic exchange and intellectual development, where contributions from a new generation of researchers play a vital part.

The deadline for abstracts is 3 February 2010. Please submit an abstract of no more than 300 words together with a short CV for consideration to holger.weiss@abo.fi. In addition to this, panel submissions must include a 300 word description of the panel topic as well as information of the panel organizer and chair.

Authors will be notified on acceptance by 3 March 2010.
For more information on Nordic Africa Days, please see www.abo.fi/nad2010.

Wicomb Conference: The Cape and the Cosmopolitan: Reading Zoe Wicomb

THE CAPE & THE COSMOPOLITAN: READING ZOË WICOMB

14-16 April 2010
University of Stellenbosch

CONVENORS:

Meg Samuelson (Stellenbosch) & Kai Easton (SOAS)

CONFIRMED EVENT:

Public reading by Zoë Wicomb

CONFIRMED KEYNOTE SPEAKERS:

Dorothy Driver (Adelaide)

Abdulrazak Gurnah (Kent)

Following the success of the first colloquium, Zoë Wicomb: Texts & Histories, co-hosted by SOAS and the University of York in London in 2008 (see link: http://www.soas.ac.uk/events/event46091.html), the University of Stellenbosch, together with SOAS, is delighted to announce the second collaborative conference on Wicomb’s fiction and criticism.

This 2010 conference returns Wicomb to the Cape both literally and in terms of focusing scholarly attention on the site of her native space where so much of her fiction has converged. Along with this emphasis on the local, however, the conference aims to consider more cosmopolitan connections, to engage with the Cape and its history of global intersections. In doing so, it follows Wicomb in exploring ‘how setting functions much like intertextuality’ for the postcolonial writer, who, by introducing ‘dialogue between texts … brings into being the interconnectedness of the human world in a divided society’.[1] Building on the original London event, “The Cape and the Cosmopolitan: Reading Zoë Wicomb” promises to be an extended interdisciplinary and interregional dialogue on and around Wicomb's work.

We invite abstracts of papers that fall directly within ideas of ‘The Cape and the Cosmopolitan’, or engage with it at a tangent in relation to Wicomb’s fictional texts, her cultural criticism, or in terms of the contexts and intertexts of her fiction from various disciplinary angles. How, for example, do those of us working in different fields ‘read’ Wicomb? What kinds of contributions might Wicomb’s literary representations make to research in other disciplines (such as history, anthropology, political science, etc) and vice versa? How can we productively situate Wicomb’s fiction alongside other ‘Cape’ and ‘Cosmopolitan’ literary texts and how do authors in other genres and regions respond to her fiction? How might we tease out ideas of intertextuality in Wicomb’s work – whether in light of local Cape archival histories and fictions or more obviously cosmopolitan literary, historical or geographical traces?

Some may wish to explore comparative or connective readings between Wicomb and other writers or to draw on her cultural criticism to read other texts that resonate with the conference theme; others might look at questions of readerships, reception, publication and authorship and/or consider how Wicomb’s writing is positioned in relation to national and transnational canons We would also welcome papers that (among other possible topics or approaches) address questions of cultural translation; trace the connective histories that enable Wicomb’s imaginative straddling of South Africa and Scotland; explore Wicomb’s inscription of the Cape at the intersection of Africa, the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean or the ways in which her fiction can be read within constructs of “African literature”; and engage the various forms of exile (including that of the liberation movement) represented in or informing her writing.

The conference aims to create a forum not only for dialogues between disciplines but also between emergent and established researchers. To this end, we wish to encourage in particular participation by graduate students and recently graduated scholars.

FURTHER CONFERENCE DETAILS:

Conference panels will be held in a single venue rather than in parallel panels to promote a sustained and substantial conversation between participants. In addition to scholarly presentations and keynote addresses, the conference will also feature panel discussions between writers who engage with the Cape and/or the Cosmopolitan.

We hope to be able to offer some financial support to selected graduate student presenters, and those wishing to apply for such support should please submit a separate motivation (approx. 1 page in length) along with their abstract. Depending on the success of our funding applications, a minimal conference fee might be imposed. The convenors plan to publish selected conference proceedings in journal and/or book form following the conference, and participants will be invited to submit revised papers to be considered for publication.

Please submit abstracts of approximately 300 words by 5 December to: Wicombconference@sun.ac.za. Our selection process will be finalised by 23 December, though if an earlier response is required for funding applications, please do indicate this when you send your abstract.

The conference website is currently under development and can be accessed at: http://sun025.sun.ac.za/portal/page/portal/Arts/Departments/english/news_activities/Tab4 or via “News & Activities” on http://www.sun.ac.za/english.

Conference Committee: Meg Samuelson (Stellenbosch convenor), Kai Easton (SOAS convenor), Lucy Graham, Jeanne Ellis, Grace Musila, Lynda Spencer, Tina Steiner

Graduate Assistants: Grant Andrews and Grace Kim

BLANK PROJECTS: Exhibition Opening and Walkabout: Stephen Hobbs' END OF CITIES: 5/6 Nov.

blank projects in partnership with the Goethe Institut and Pro Helvetia are proud to present

END OF CITIES

by Stephen Hobbs

5 to 27 November:

Opening:

THURSDAY 5 November 2009 @ 18h00

at our new space, 113-115 Sir Lowry road, Woodstock.

Public interventions:

FRIDAY 6 November at 18:00

walk commencing from the 'old' blank, 198 Buitengracht street.

End of Cities represents the final exhibition in a three year trajectory of projects centered around Johannesburg, Durban and Cape Town respectively. Hobbs initiated this body of work with a view to reframing his principal preoccupations with photography where consistent documentation of particular subjects, construction sites, buildings, urban debris, contradictory information in the landscape etc serve as the starting point for a series of new sculptural and architectonic expressions.

The collective body of work over this three year period has sought its particular conceptual and formal properties through a particular responsiveness to the architectural and spatial qualities of each of the exhibition venues and to varying degrees particular references to each city.

End of Cities demonstrates the most developed of these objectives through a range of works inspired by the incomplete state of the gallery itself and an even more overt incomplete highway network on the City foreshore.

End of Cities celebrates the area of the ‘unfinished’ highways as a non-place of fantasy and projection. Hobbs’ engagement with Thiresh Govender, architect and fellow city enthusiast has inspired a conversation around this study area influencing both the installation at the new Blank Projects exhibition space and the public domain.

Stephen Hobbs and Thiresh Govender will conduct a walk of the study area which includes interventions at the unfinished highway site, commencing at 18:00 from the ‘old’ blank projects space, 198 Buitengracht street, Bo-Kaap on Friday 6 November.

RSVP for the walk before the 31st of October by sending a mail to blankprojects@gmail.com

Acknowledgements:
Project supported by The Trinity Session & Thiresh Govender

THE TELLURIDE ASSOCIATION REESE MILLER INTERNATIONAL EXCHANGE TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN

In association with the UCT International Academic Programs Office (IAPO), the Telluride Association would like to announce an international travel and study abroad exchange opportunity for UCT Masters and Doctoral students in any field of study to the University ofMichigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan. (To learn more about the University of Michigan visit www.umich.edu)

The Reese Miller International Exchange will enable one UCT Masters or Doctoral student to attend the University of Michigan for one year of academic study. University fees, travel costs, living expenses, and health insurance will be paid for by the scholarship through funds from the Telluride Association and the University of Michigan. (To learn more about the Telluride Association visithttp://www.tellurideassociation.org)

To find out more about this exciting opportunity, the 2008/2009 Reese Miller Exchange Scholar Samantha Richmond, together with an exchange student from the University of Michigan Elyse Leonard, will be giving a presentation on the Reese Miller Exchange Scholarship:

Where: IAPO Boardroom

  The Cottages
  Lovers walk
  Rondebosch

(Tel: 021 650 2822/3740)

When: Wednesday, 28^th October 2009

Time: 1-2pm

If you are unable to attend the presentation but would like to find out more about this exciting exchange scholarship, please emailsamantharichmond21@gmail.com

For details relating to the application and/or to request application materials, please email Penny.VanZyl@uct.ac.za

Wits WISER Writing Fellowship

Alert! The Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research - WISER - is calling for applications for a new, Andrew W Mellon Foundation-funded Writing Fellowship.

The fellowship is intended “for someone who is directly engaged in social commentary and analysis during the course of his/her work in this country (e.g. as a journalist, trade unionist, public servant, in NGOs, or as an independent researcher, or non-?ction writer)”. It will be awarded for 3 -12 months and entails both a monthly stipend and a one-off grant.

The deadline for applications is 23 Oct 09. To apply, submit the following to Najibha.Deshmukh@wits.ac.za.

A detailed motivation, setting out your interest in the fellowship and a proposal for a writing project while based in WISER, demonstrating its links to one or more of the WISER research programmes and the ways in which it advances WISER’s objectives.
A full and updated CV
Two recent pieces of written work
Names and email contact details of three referees

For more details, please go to:

Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER) Writing Fellowship Application Details

Current Research in the Humanities Conference.

Finally, the English Department, lead by Phd student Megan Cawood, has launched a long awaited for, interdisciplinary Humanities conference. The dates for the conference are from Friday 30th to Saturday 31st of October, from 9am until 5pm on Friday and 9am till pm on Saturday. There will be a range of students from various disciplines presenting papers on their current research. For more information, please contact megan.cawood@gmail.com

postamble will be speaking as part of a panel on postgraduate publication at UCT, and after. We will also be publishing a special edition of the journal, drawn from the best papers at the conference. for further details on this, please contact postamble@gmail.com

Why sign up as a postamble site user?

With the postamble website beginning to take shape, so dawns the task of inviting our readership to a further engagement with the journal and its editors. The new site has a number of key functionalities, which were designed to create alternative spaces for intellectual engagement by editors, authors and readers alike.

There are a number of benefits to signing up as a user of the postamble website. A user is allowed access to comment on the blog. Users will also receive correspondence from the journal's editorial collective. This will include advertisements of internships and other editorial opporunities; call for submissions distributions; as well as news about the postamble's institutional home, the University of Cape Town's Centre for African Studies.

Blogging can be a particularly useful forum for the production and dissemination of more subjective intellectual responses to issues, which do not adhere to the conventions of the academy. It can also invite critique and response from a global audience - something that is not possible in the seminar room, or lecture hall.

The editorial collective of postamble therefore invite our readership to sign up as users and to engage in the new forum that the website has created.

For those who are able to demonstrate a sustained and critical engagement through the blog, the status of blogger may be granted. This will allow a user to begin discussions on any number of issues and concerns that are of relevance to the culture, thought, politics, and social life of the African continent and its Diaspora.

New space of intellectual engagement for postamble

As a long-time editor of postamble, and the current managing editor, publishing the work of graduate students who are thinking Africa differently has been an important exercise in getting to grips with the notion of knowledge production in Africa.

What does it mean to write about, but also, publish studies of the continent that transcend the dominant modes of thought and praxis that have characterised representations of Africa for so long? Are we doing anything novel (or revolutionary) in creating a space for students to present their ideas in a quasi-scholarly forum such as postamble? Should questions of accreditation and the formalities of academic presentation be at the fore of our agendas as editors? Or should the journal itself be seen more as a liminal intellectual space of engagement - not quite a journal in the strict sense, not quite a popular magazine or street-side publication? What of alternative forms of research presentation?

In her editorial of issue 3.1 of postamble, Danai Mupotsa raises this issue when she writes that the journal provides space “for those of us still unsure of our position as ‘knowledge producers’ to think, write and share our work. A space which provides us, as a new generation of thinkers the opportunity to challenge the existing canon and enter into publication: a bold political move.”

This is an important statement of intent and of vision, which postamble will need to take forward as it engages in processes of self-reflection, self-criticism and regeneration. Importantly, there are no clear-cut answer to these questions and concerns; that they have been posed is the critical point.

This new website, I hope, will become an integral part of these internal processes of conceptualisation for the journal itself. However, it has also been thought of as a space not only for the work of the journal to emerge through the usual peer-reviewed submissions, photographic essays, book reviews, and the like, but also a space for our editors, contributors, and other interested individuals and collectivities to grapple in constructive and critical ways with the meanings of Africa and its Diaspora in the context of key global debates around race, culture, identity, and heritage, among others.

We can therefore look forward, I think, to a great deal of creativity and intelligent engagement in the months and years to come. The postamble editorial collective have recruited four new editors in 2008, who it is hoped will contribute to making and re-making the website through their own engagements. Our overseas editors will also be a part of stimulating the activities of the journal through their own interventions.

May the discussions commence.

-Gerard Ralphs

New website is live!

Welcome to postamble's new website! The site is still in the final stages of development so please bear with us as we finish up.

The current issue of postamble is available on our old site: www.africanstudies.uct.ac.za/postamble/.

Watch this space for the forthcoming issue of postamble, Science, Technology and Society in Africa.