Heidi Grunebaum

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Associate Professor,
Director

Heidi Grunebaum is a Senior Researcher at the CHR where she works on the research theme, Aesthetics and Politics and with the Factory of the Arts. Grunebaum’s work focuses on social and aesthetic responses to the afterlives of genocide, war and mass violence and on the Holocaust, apartheid and the Palestine Nakba, in particular. Her research interests include Holocaust and genocide studies; critical memory studies; aesthetics and politics; comparative literary, film and narrative studies; postcolonial theory and public culture.

Grunebaum is author of the monograph, Memorializing the Past: Everyday Life in South Africa after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (New Jersey: Transaction, 2011) co-editor, with Emile Maurice, of Uncontained: Opening the Community Arts Project Archive (Cape Town: CHR, 2012) and Athlone in Mind (Cape Town CHR, 2017) with curator, Kurt Campbell. With Mark J Kaplan she made the documentary film, The Village Under the Forest (2013), which received the audience award for Best South African Documentary Film at Encounters International Documentary Film Festival in 2013. Grunebaum has published in Current Writing, Research in African Literatures, Fantomas, the PMLA, Encounters: International Journal on Culture and Society, Third Text Africa, Southern African Anthropology and Critical Arts amongst others. Her poetry is published in Botsotso Journal for South African Arts and Cultures and Running Towards Us: New Writing from South Africa (Portsmouth: Heinemann, 2000) and New Contrast.

PUBLICATIONS

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BOOKS (Peer-Reviewed)

• Memorializing the Past: Everyday Life in South Africa after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. New Brunswick: Transaction, 2011.

EDITED COLLECTIONS

• Editor, Jon Berndt, Design for Change with an introduction by Heidi Grunebaum and essays by Patricia Hayes, John Higgins and postscript by Jill Joubert. Johannesburg: Real African Publishers, forthcoming 2018.
• Heidi Grunebaum and Kurt Campbell (eds.), Athlone ‘in Mind’. Cape Town: Centre for Humanities Research, UWC, 2017. See also www.athloneinmind.com
• Heidi Grunebaum and Emile Maurice (eds.), Uncontained: Opening the Community Arts Project Archive. Cape Town: Centre for Humanities Research, UWC, 2012.

 

DOCUMENTARY FEATURE FILM

• Mark J Kaplan and Heidi Grunebaum, The Village Under the Forest. Documentary film. South Africa: Grey Matter Media, 2013.

JOURNAL ARTICLES (Peer Reviewed)

• “No consolation: the poetics of lament and the insistence of complicity” in South African Music Studies, Vol. 34/35, 2016. 299-310.
• “Unseaming images: The limits and possibilities for reconfiguring albums of complicity” in Critical Arts: South-North Cultural and Media Studies Vol 29, S1, 2015. 564-578.
• “Landscape, complicity and partitioned zones at Lubya and South Africa Forest in Israel-Palestine” in Anthropology Southern Africa Vol 37, 1 & 2, 2014.
• “’Uncontained’ and the constraints of historicism as method: A reply to Mario Pissarra” in Third Text Africa Vol. 3, 1, November 2013. 86-92.
• “The Time after the War: Notes on Historical Erasures and Post-apartheid Pasts” Encounters: International Journal on Culture and Society 5 Fall, 2012. 185-196.
• “Unburying the Dead in ‘The Mother City’: Urban Topographies of Erasure” in PMLA, Special issue on “Cities”. 122.1 (January) 2007: 210 – 219.
• “Talking to Ourselves “Amongst the Innocent Dead”: On Reconciliation, Forgiveness and Mourning”. PMLA. 117.2 (March) 2002: 306-310.
• “Re-placing Pasts, Forgetting Presents: Narrative, Place and Memory in the Time of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.” Research in African Literatures. 32.3 (August 2001): 198-212.
• “Saying the Unspeakable: Language and Identity after Auschwitz as a Narrative Model for Memory in South Africa.” Current Writing 8. 2 (1996): 13-22.

JOURNAL ARTICLES (Other)

•  Yazir Henri. “Jenseits der Regenbogennation: Reflektionen uber Gewalt und Erinnerung im heutigen Kapstadt.” Trans.Franziska Pommer. Im Inneren der Globalisierung: Psychosoziale Arbeit in Gewaltkontexten. medico-Report 26. 2005: 82-91.
• Yazir Henri. “Auf der Suche nach einer geteilten Menschlichkeit im Kampf für den Frieden.” Trans.Thomas Siebert. Fantomas. 1.1 (April) 2002.

CHAPTERS IN BOOKS (Peer Reviewed)

• “Procession through ruins: Space and the politics of a joint memory practice in Palestine-Israel” in Felicitas Macgilchrist and Roman Richtera (eds.), The Limits of ‘Memory’. What follows?. New York: Punctum, forthcoming 2018.
• ”Between Nakba, Shoah and apartheid: notes on a film from the interstices” in Fazil Moradi, Maria Six-Hohenbalken and Ralph Buchenhorst (eds.), Surviving Genocide: On What Remains and the Possibility of Representation. London and New York: Routledge, 2017. 209-234.
• Republication of “Unseaming images: The limits and possibilities for reconfiguring albums of complicity” (in Critical Arts: South-North Cultural and Media Studies Vol 29, S1, 2015) in Leora Farber and Claire Jorgensen (eds.), Critical Addresses: The-Archive-In-Process. Johannesburg: Jacana Press, 2017. 73-84.
• “On the time-spaces of Zionist narratives: Reflections on the Jewish National Fund and the socialisation of Zionism in South Africa” in Na’eem Jeenah, ed., Pretending Democracy: Israel, an Ethnocratic State. Johannesburg: Afro-Middle East Centre, 2012.
• Yazir Henri. “Where the Mountain Meets its Shadow: A Conversation of Memory and Identity and Fragmented Belonging in Present-day South Africa.” Eds. Bo Strath and Ron Robins.Homelands: The Politics of Space and the Poetics of Power. Brussels: Peter Lang, 2003. 267-282.
• Yazir Henri. “Re-membering Bodies, Producing Histories: Holocaust Survivor Narrative and Truth and Reconciliation Commission Testimony.” Eds.Jill Bennett and Rozanne Kennedy. World Memory: Global Trajectories of Trauma. London: Macmillan-Palgrave, 2003. 101-118.
• Steven Robins. “Crossing the Colour(ed) Line: TRC Mediations of Belonging and Identity.” Painted by History, Shaped by Place. Ed. Zimitri Erasmus. Cape Town: Kwela, 2001. 159-172.
• “Jewishness and Otherness in Albert Memmi’s La Statue de Sel.” Jewries at the Frontier. Eds. Sander Gilman and Milton Shain. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999. 290-305.”
• and Oren Stier. “The Question (of) Remains: Remembering Shoah, Forgetting Reconciliation.” Facing the Truth. Eds. James Cochrane, John de Gruchy and Stephen Martin. Cape Town and Athens, Ohio: David Philip and Ohio University Press, 1999. 142-152.

 

CHAPTERS IN BOOKS

• “A Question of Place” in Heidi Grunebaum and Kurt Campbell (eds.), Athlone ‘in Mind’. Cape Town: Centre for Humanities Research, UWC, 2017. 1-9.
• “Reflections in a Mirror: From South Africa to Palestine/Israel and back again” in Jon Soske and Sean Jacobs (eds.), Apartheid Israel: The Politics of an Analogy. Chicago: Haymarket, 2015. 161-168.
• Premesh Lalu and Jane Taylor, “Uncontained — Itineraries of thought on opening the CAP print collection” in Heidi Grunebaum and Emile Maurice (eds.), Uncontained: Opening the Community Arts Project Archive. Cape Town: Centre for Humanities Research, UWC, 2012.
• Yazir Henri and Usche Merk, “Outside the Frames: The Politics of Memory and Social Recovery after Apartheid” in Romin Khan and Jens Erik Ambacher (eds.), Südafrika nach der Apartheid – die Grenzen der Befreiung. Berlin: Verlag Assoziation A, 2010.

 

OTHER PUBLICATIONS

• “After this”. Botstotso Journal for South African Arts and Cultures. January 2016.
• “Love Notes for our Age”. New Contrast Literary Journal. No. 171 October 2015, 15-17.
• “Acknowledging the Nakba; Supporting the Return of Refugees: Reflections from a Jewish South African visit to Palestine and ceremony at Lubya” in Voices of the South, Karibu Foundation, May 2015, 1-3.
• “Searching for my breath”. Text for exhibition, ‘SEX MACHT GUT Ausstellung / Vernissage’ Photographs and Videos by Andreas Fux, Rinat Schnadower, Susanne Schleyer, Irineu Destourelles and Avi Berg. Curated by Avi Berg and Lars Dreiucker at Sprechsaal Vernissage, Berlin, Germany. 27 March to 22 May 2015.
• Translation from French into English of Souleyman Bachir Diagne, “Charlie Hebdo” and Africa – Souleyman Bachir Diagne: “The true martyrs” Orginally published in French in Le Point Afrique on 11 January 2015. The French version is available at http://afrique.lepoint.fr/actualites/charlie-hebdo-et-l-afrique-souleymane-bachir-diagne-les-vrais-martyrs-11-01-2015-1895511_2365.php Translation posted on the CHR’s Facebook page on 12 January 2015.
• Translation with Justine Okoldkoff of English script of documentary film, The Village Under the Forest (Kaplan and Grunebaum, 2013) into French subtitles, Le Village Sous La Forêt, for screenings at festivals in France and Switzerland, 2014.
• “A debt of history”. Text contributed to Zochrot exhibition, ‘The New KKL’, curated by Eitan Bronstein and Moran Barir. Zochrot Visual Research Laboratory, Tel-Aviv.12 March – 11 May 2014
• “The Making of The Village Under the Forest” in Voices of the South, Karibu Foundation, August 2013, pp 1-3.
• Mark Kaplan, “The South Africa Forest in Israel: Seeing the wood and the trees”, Cape Times, Friday 7 June, 2013, p 9.
• “Cape of Storms” in Heidi Grunebaum and Emile Maurice (eds.), Uncontained: Opening the Community Arts Project Archive. Cape Town: Centre for Humanities Research, UWC, 2012.
• “Bringing Ourselves Back: A Reflection on the Combatants Support Initiative 2001-2004” Cape Town: Direct Action Centre for Peace and Memory, 2005.
• “Western Cape Action Tour Training Manual” Cape Town: Direct Action Centre for Peace and Memory, 2005.
• “TRC Stories: Searching for the Missing” Botsotso Journal for South African Arts and Cultures. Summer, 2002. 54.
• “With Each Small Step: Peace, Remembrance and ‘White’ South African Jewishness. Rosh Hashana Annual. Temple Israel (Cape Town Progressive Jewish Congregation), September 2001.
• “Social Responsibility and South African Jewishness”. South African Jewish Report, June 16 – 24, 2000.
• “TRC Stories: It Gets Under the Skin”. Running Towards Us: New Writing from South Africa. Ed. Isabel Balseiro. Portsmouth: Heinemann, 2000. 51