Politics of archives and struggles for emancipation: Reflecting on experiences from Middle East and Southern Africa

This seminar series aims at approaching Southern Africa and Middle Eastern experiences in archives building, oral history and public history in relation to emancipatory politics. Scholars and activists of both regions, like their counterparts in societies that have experienced protracted periods of oppression, violence and historical erasure, have for many years elaborated ideas and practices to recover, interpret and disseminate histories on their own terms. Cognisant of the colonial ordering and blind spots of official archives, they turned from the 1970s onward to alternative archiving and oral history to produce new and counter-hegemonic narratives. These practices were conceived as a way to shed light on people (indigenous populations, oppressed minorities, women, refugees, underprivileged groups) who were marginalized or absent from the hegemonic narrative while providing them with tools for self-emancipation. More contemporary struggles or social movements (such as Marikana, Fees must Fall or the Arab Spring) also has showed the continued emancipatory potential of archiving practices and public history.

This seminar series aims at reflecting on the practices and issues at stake in these various experiences in both regions. To that end, several sets of questions may be raised:

• How archives have become sites of contention between state and non-state actors? What is the role of archive production and public history in the face off between hegemonic and counter-hegemonic narratives? How have moments of struggle also been decisive in moulding and transforming the very idea of archive?
• Which uses of archive and public history helped empowering local communities and giving voice to dispossessed populations? Which archiving actors and institutions have played a role in these emancipatory experiences? How collections kept in the Global North can be reclaimed or made use of by actors in the Global South?
• From a more practical perspective, how do we conceive archiving practices that fit with emancipatory goals? What ethical protocols should the researchers follow in collecting archives and oral testimonies? How to deal with the questions of funding and ownership in designing emancipatory archiving practices? To what kind of archival institutions can researchers turn in order to keep collections while preserving their autonomy and ensuring open access and use? In oppressive contexts, are there safe havens for archival documentation? How technological choices such as those related to digitization or dissemination platforms, far from being neutral, are impacting archiving politics?
• What are the archival afterlives of emancipatory politics? How do we deal with moments of despair? Also, how to keep records in times of uncertainty, displacement or exile? How and why to preserve all archives despite reluctancy from liberation movements or other political actors involved in past struggles?

Each seminar session will take place in situ at one of the different partner institutions, in Johannesburg, Beirut, Birzeit and Brussels, and online. Five sessions are planned between November 2022 and September 2023. Each session will focus on a particular theme and will feature a speaker from the Middle East and a speaker from Southern Africa as well as a moderator.

 Next session

Film archives after liberation

with Jihan El Tahri & Sifiso Khanyile

Monday 27 February 2023, 4pm to 6pm (CET)

Online on ZOOM – Here

Contacts: omam@ulb.be

The board of South Africa’s Film and Publication Board recently ruled that Ousmane Sembène’s seminal 1966 film Black Girl contained hate speech and was not fit for screening during the Joburg Film Festival. A similar incident took place during the fifteen edition of Documenta when an Expert Panel determined that an installation featuring militant films of the Palestinian revolution (1960-80s) was antisemitic because Israel was portrayed in a one-sided negative way. These acts of censorship raise fundamental questions about the politics surrounding film archives. Indeed, what is it about film archives that is so confronting and threatening in the aftermath of formal colonialism and liberation? How do film archives as memory fragments and traces of history contribute to reproduce or unsettle pasts but also to reimagine alternative futures? And what are the challenges of working with film archives in the current political moment, particularly concerning access, indexing, copy rights, circulation, visibility, infrastructure, and so on? These and other questions will be central to our next seminar on the ‘Politics of archives and struggles for emancipation: Reflecting on experiences from Middle East and Southern Africa’.

Jihan El Tahri is a multi-award-winning film director, writer, visual artist, and producer. She currently serves as the General Director of the Berlin-based documentary support institution DOX BOX. El Tahri has been a member of The Academy (Oscars) since 2017 and is currently on the selection committee of the Locarno International Film Festival. She has directed more than 15 films and her visual art exhibitions have traveled to renowned museums and several Biennales around the world. Her writings include Les Sept Vies de Yasser Arafat (Grasset) and Israel and the Arabs, The 50 Years War (Penguin). She continues to mentor and direct various documentary and filmmaking labs. El Tahri has served on the boards of several African film organizations including the Federation of Pan African Cinema and The Guild of African Filmmakers in the Diaspora.

Sifiso Khanyile is a Johannesburg based multi award winning filmmaker and archive researcher. He’s also a member of the International Emmys. Khanyile has produced 9 films, writing and directing 4 of those including 3 award winning documentaries ‘Uprize’, ‘A New Country’, and ‘The Reclaimers’. With 13 years experience in film, television and news production. His work is concerned with memory and history and how they continue to shape contemporary imaginations of South Africa. His recently completed short-film adaptation of Njabulo Ndebele’s ‘The Prophetess’ expands his vocabulary into the South African literary archive, having worked with audio and video archives in the past. His ongoing project, ‘Black Joy Under Apartheid’, foregrounds black leisure and pleasure under apartheid to offer counter-hegemonic narratives to black victimhood. Khanyile has also made music videos for Impande Core, Tumi (Stogie T) as well as Thabang Tabane. As an archive researcher, Khanyile has presented at archive symposiums such as the Visionary Archives Festival at the Arsenal in Berlin (2015). He is currently writing his debut narrative feature ‘Problematik’, which was developed as part of Venice Biennale Cinema College 2021 -2022, and Venice Gap Financing Market.

Past sessions

Documenting struggles in progress

Friday, November 11^th, 2022 at 2pm (Beirut and South Africa), 7am (Eastern Coast)

Ifpo’s conference room (Beirut) and online

If you want to attend the conference at Ifpo, please, send us an email : m.rey@ifporient.org

Khaled Fahmy

Documenting the Egyptian Revolution of 25 January 2011

Khaled Fahmy FBA is Professor of North Africa and the Middle East at Tufts University. His research interests lie in the social and cultural history of modern Egypt and his publications include a book on the social history of the Egyptian army in the first half of the 19^th century (All the Pasha’s Men: Mehmed Ali, His Army and the Making of Modern Egypt—Cambridge University Press, 1997), a biography on Mehmed Ali (Mehmed Ali: From Ottoman Governor to Ruler of Egypt—Oneworld Publications, 2008), and, more recently, an award-winning book on the intersection of law and medicine in 19^th century Egypt (In Quest of Justice: Islamic Law and Forensic Medicine in Modern Egypt—University of California Press, 2018). Since the outbreak of the January 2011 Revolution, he has been a regular contributor to Egyptian and international media.

Dale T. McKinley

A ‘full panorama’ movement archive: South Africa’s Anti-Privatisation Forum (APF)

Dale T. McKinley is an independent writer, researcher and lecturer and presently, research and education officer at the International Labour, Research and Information Group based in Johannesburg. He holds a PhD. in International Political Economy/African Studies and is a long-time political activist who has been involved in social movement, community and liberation organisations and struggles for over three decades. The author of four books, Dale has written and researched widely on various aspects of South African and international political, social and economic issues and struggles, and is a regular public speaker as well as contributor and commentator in the media.

Session coordinated and moderated by Chaymaa Hassabo (member of ERC Live-AR – Ceped (Institut de Recherche pour le Développement)) and Noor Nieftagodein (head of the History Workshop – Wits University)

Partner institutions: Ifpo, Wits History Workshop, IPS, ULB, Birzeit University, Ifas-Research