Power, Knowledge and the Politics of Public Pasts

Abstract

This article examines the ways in which the disciplines of history and archaeology in South Africa relate and how they have negotiated the public as part of their disciplinary practices of producing knowledge about the past that is accessible. It presents an analysis of questions of knowledge and power, and the different ways that scholars working broadly as ‘historians’ or ‘archaeologists’ have viewed the relationship between expertise and ‘community’. It is also about how relations of expertise have been negotiated within and across these fields, and particularly how those relations of expertise have been contested. This is done through an analysis of the varied social history research and efforts at popularisation of the History Workshop at the University of the Witwatersrand, as well as the forms of public engagement on the part of public archaeologists in the District Six Museum and in Khoisan rock art research. The article also analyses the District Six Museum in Cape Town as a space of emerging expertise in the field of public history, whose practice and experience demonstrates the possibilities and limits of transcending relations of knowledge characterised by a politics of paternalism and atonement, in which public scholarship is limited to relations of outreach. The article is concerned to understand the possibilities of decentring and relocating expertise outside the academy.