Troubling Archives

Beschreibung

How to challenge colonial legacies: Namibian and South African artists use archives to develop alternative memory practices.
Namibia’s colonial history casts a long shadow over the country’s present. Contemporary authors and artists confront the legacies of German and South African colonial rule and engage creatively with the persistent remnants of the past. In their works, the archive remains both an invaluable and fraught resource for accessing obscured histories. Julia Rensing examines how writers and artists from Namibia and South Africa navigate archival silences, omissions, and power structures to renegotiate historical narratives and address intergenerational trauma. Their creative practices challenge conventional understandings of archives and forms of commemoration, highlighting the diverse experiences that shape Namibian society and memory cultures.

Autor*in

Julia Rensing
Julia Rensing, geb. 1991, ist Postdoktorandin und Dozentin am Zentrum für Afrikastudien an der Universität Basel. In ihrer Forschung untersucht sie, wie Archive zur alternativen Produktion von Wissen genutzt werden und wie künstlerische Praktiken Diskurse über (De)kolonialität und Erinnerung prägen. Sie ist Mitglied von freiburg-postkolonial.

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Memory Culture Colonialism Namibia South Africa

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»This fine-grained exploration of colonial archives, Namibian women’s personal narratives, and the transformative engagements with archives by a new generation of artists and authors significantly shifts our way of seeing history and listening to its reverberations. Troubling Archives illuminates multi-perspective approaches to the legacies of truly devastating pasts and traumatic experiences.«
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»Troubling Archives is a welcomed contribution to feminist archival research in art and literature. In the last few decades, artists and writers have turned to archival materials as resources with the potential to unsettle conventional historical narratives. Well-researched and thoroughly refreshing, Julia Rensing’s Troubling Archives offers thought-provoking analyses of this phenomenon and captures the affective resonance of archives.«
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