Browsing by Subject "oral history"
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- ItemRestrictedMemory, Conscience andthe Museum in South Africa: The Old Langa Pass Office and Court(2008) Ralphs, GerardThe old pass office and court in Langa was a site of apartheid brutality. In its day-to-day workings, the court found thousands of South Africans guilty of ‘crimes’ that were only crimes in the radically unjust society that the apartheid government cultivated. This paper explores how residents from Langa have remembered the site of the old pass office and court through the lens of oral history. In doing so, it asks how the site, now the Langa Museum, may become a space of memory, identity, and political conscience and consciousness in a post-apartheid context. What insight and wisdom lie embedded in Langa residents’ oral histories about the old pass office? And how can oral historians, Langa residents, museum and heritage practitioners, and visitors to Langa access and utilise the transformative narrative power of these site-stories in the shifting contexts of the site as an emergent social history museum? At what point does the old Langa pass office cease to be a dark space of apartheid, and begin to become a space of post-apartheid humanity and creativity? Indeed, can the Langa Museum become a ‘living’ social history museum? What would a transformation of this nature entail for oral history, Cape Town's memory communities, community-based heritage practice, citizenship, and identity in the South African postcolony?
- ItemMetadata onlyOral history and digital stories from Cape Town(2010) Centre for Popular MemoryPeople in South Africa have a dynamic, but largely unrecorded heritage. The Centre for Popular Memory (CPM) creates spaces for these stories to be heard, seen and remembered. Through oral history, students are able to gain a better understanding of an historical event from the experiences of people. These interviews and digital stories assist in contextualizing local historical events by providing living people's testimonies of their experiences.
- ItemRestrictedThe Divergence between Artistic and Academic Dissemination of Oral History: Beyond the Archive - From the Spoken Word through Performance to Moving Images(2008) Neuschafer, PascaleThis article explores the creative uses of oral history beyond the archive. How does the artistic framing of oral history create an invaluable public platform for the voices behind the stories? Traditional oral history for research purposes is undoubtedly a wellspring of information which unfortunately often remains under-utilised in the archive. In terms of popular and accessible forms of public dissemination, the merits of artistic dissemination of oral history in the form of video documentaries and performance are discussed. The article focuses on Street Stories (a series of documentaries shot over three years by the Centre for Popular Memory) and on Cargo, a physical theatre collaboration between Jazz Art and the Magnet Company.
- ItemOpen AccessWhat lies below: Exploring Constructions of Collective Momery in Archival Collections(2008) Meyer, RenateThis article interrogates relationships within and between oral history narratives and how such constructions affect the reading/analysis of both individual and collective oral histories. Within this field, a number of issues need to be considered. Some of the most prominent include the process of recording a life story; the play between archiving a dynamic narrative within an archival system of categorisation and how a particular narrative affects the reading of other narratives within that collection. It is also of particular interest to explore how such layering remains dynamic, fuses or separates as time goes by and collections grow.