Browsing by Author "Angier, Kate"

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    Producing the Precolonial: Professional and Popular Lives of Mapungubwe, 1937-2017
    Ramji, Himal; Hamilton, Carolyn; Angier, Kate; Kar, Bodhisattva
    This thesis is a study of the changing meanings of the thing that is 'Mapungubwe' (most often considered as a thirteenth-century southern African state) within and outside the academy from 1937 and 2017, deliberately excluding meanings that might have existed prior to 1937, analysing the socio-political work Mapungubwe has been made to do in this period. The study explores the shaping and positioning of evidence in the production of narratives that ascribe and/or enforce particular truths or regimes of truth. To do this, I consider the politico-cultural associations that convert an object into evidence of something and make that evidence meaningful. Under what conditions, and for what reasons does this conversion occur? And, what specific meaning is imposed into the object? This is, therefore, an analytical disaggregation and political assessment of the particular signs and symbols through which the composite and contested imaginaire of Mapungubwe has been historically constructed. Necessarily, it is also an unpicking of the languages of evidence. The work is divided into three parts, each dealing with a different strut in the making of Mapungubwe. The first chapter covers the archaeological production of Mapungubwe, from the first excavational work conducted in the 1930s, until more recent work, during the 2010s. During the early twentieth century, the topic of Mapungubwe was cloistered within academic archaeology, particularly at the University of Pretoria. It was only after the end of apartheid that the 'trope' of Mapungubwe began to be deployed in an increasingly wider social realm and integrated into multiple educational and heritage projects, with particular encouragement from the state. The second chapter looks at the introduction and development of the theme of Mapungubwe in the South African national history education curriculum after 2003, when it was also made a UNESCO World Heritage Site and harnessed as name of the Order of Mapungubwe. The chapter analyses the narrative presentation of Mapungubwe in the existing curriculum, and the attending conceptual devices through which this narrative is constructed and sustained. The third chapter scans the explosion of Mapungubwe in popular discourses, about a decade after its strategic foregrounding in school education and institutionalisation as heritage. In this chapter I examine several literary narratives, artistic productions and promotional activities of tourism in conjunction with the current political and economic developments in the area. I make use of sources from various different academic disciplines, including archaeology, history, politics, education and history education, literary theory, as well as relevant samples from fictive writing, sculpture, poetry, touristic longform writing, and advertisements. In bringing together such diverse orders of discourse, the thesis attempts to map the expanding topographies of Mapungubwe - a venture that, I submit, has methodological and topical significance beyond the immediate field of inquiry. Through this work, the reader will be able to see how the language used to describe and inscribe meaning in Mapungubwe has changed over time, exposing the malleability of (precolonial) history in the hands of both professionals and non-professionals. The thesis makes clear to the reader the importance of 'popular' representations of history in the development of modern culture, both in terms of reproducing existing conditions, as well as resisting them. Finally, the thesis troubles the concept of the 'precolonial', and considers what changing purpose the period has had over time, how it shapes our view of history, and how we could alternatively envisage the precolonial and, thus, history.
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    The trajectory of the shifts in academic and civic identity in South African and English secondary school History National Curriculums across two key reform moments
    (2017) Kukard, Kirstin Jane; Hoadley, Ursula Kate; Angier, Kate
    This thesis seeks to explore the trajectories of the kinds of academic and civic identities that four different history curriculums would seek to produce. The curriculum documents chosen are two South African (Curriculum 2005 [1997] and the Curriculum and Policy Statement [2011]) and two English (the first national curriculum [1991] and the most recent [2014] Secondary history national curriculum). These curriculums have been chosen in part because of the historical connections the two countries share, as well as the relationships that exist between the history educationalists in the two contexts. The theoretical underpinning for the discussion of identity are Bernstein's concepts of instructional and regulative discourse. In addition to examining the shifts in imagined identity, the other question which the thesis seeks to answer is that of the underlying purpose of school history. Three ideal types were therefore developed in relation to the three dominant ways of viewing the purpose of history education that emerges in history education literature. The academic and civic identities were analysed through the construction of an analytic framework developed through an iterative process of engaging with the data and history education literature. A framework was also developed to consider the degree to which the four curriculum documents conform to the three ideal types. The shifts in overall purpose and identity within the two contexts are striking. The first English national curriculum saw a tension between a focus on developing history students who had a strong sense of national identity and using constructivist models that teach the students the knowledge base of the subject. Curriculum 2005 instead focused on attempting to create students who were actively engaged with the problems of their current day situation. By the second English national curriculum, this focus on making connections to current day challenges had been introduced in addition to continuing concerns about national identity and understanding the way in which historians work. The Curriculum and Policy Statement reform in South Africa brought greater concerns for developing historical thinking, but nevertheless retained a focus on actively engaged citizenship.