The Origins Centre at the University of Witwatersrand hummed over the weekend of 24 and 25 March during a workshop co-hosted by the APC initiative and the Johannesburg Art Gallery (JAG). The workshop on ‘tribing and untribing the archive’ brought together established and emerging archaeologists, historians, anthropologists, curators, visual artists and others contributing to an APC-JAG collaboration that focuses on the material culture archive pertinent to the Thukela-Mzimkhulu region(1750-1910), located mostly, but not exclusively, in collections.

Museums and galleries all over South Africa, as well as in many cities in Western Europe and North America, have long displayed African cultural artefacts as ‘tribal’ curiosities. Since the decolonization of Africa in the 1960s and 1970s, some of these institutions have graduated to displaying what their curatorial staff see as the more aesthetically pleasing of these artefacts as objects of African tribal ‘art’. Only a few move beyond historyless ethnographic perspectives and build cultural artefacts into displays where they speak as items made in societies with histories rather than just ‘customs’.

Professor Njabulo Ndebele delivered a rousing opening address at the recent launch of the Cambridge History of South African Literature in which he urged 'a futuristic focus on interconnections and interconnectedness'. APC online presents a transcript of his spoken words

Last month saw the launch of Cuento populares de África (‘Popular tales from Africa’), a collection of 68 tales from Sub-Saharan Africa and Madagascar translated into Spanish and edited by APC Honorary Research Fellow José Manuel de Prada.

‘For practical reasons, most of the tales have been taken from 19th century sources now in the public domain, mostly in English,’ says De Prada, ‘but 12 of the stories come from sources in Spanish, both published and unpublished. Some were collected and translated by Spanish scholars in different parts of Africa. Others come from the doctoral theses or publications of African researchers who studied at Spanish universities.’

A few stories, most of them !xun, were contributed by Marlene Winberg, who completed her Masters thesis with distinction in association with the APC research initiative. A small sample of her vast collection of San oral literature, some of these stories appear in print for the first time.

Composer Philip Miller will be attending his first Archive and Public research workshop in April, having joined the research initiative as an Honorary Research Scholar.

Miller’s interest in working with archive as an instrumental part of the compositional process was sparked by his participation in the group exhibition, Holdings, curated by Professor Jane Taylor, as part of with the broader Refiguring the Archive project conceived by Professor Carolyn Hamilton in 1998.

In April 2012, the APC initiative will be hosting Ann Cvetkovich, Ellen C Garwood Centennial Professor of English and Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.

During her visit, Cvetkovich will be participating in the first APC workshop of 2012, as well as presenting a seminar on The Queer Art of the Counterarchive.

Cvetkovich is the author of Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian Sensationalism (Rutgers, 1992) and An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Duke, 2003). She co-edited, with Ann Pellegrini, ‘Public Sentiments’, a special issue of The Scholar and Feminist Online, and, with Janet Staiger and Ann Reynolds, Political Emotions (Routledge, 2010).