What is Visual History & Theory?
Visual History & Theory is a research platform at the University of the Western Cape that promotes a critical engagement with the image in relation to other forms of knowledge production, creativity and contest in Africa and elsewhere. The ‘visual turn’ too often associates visual culture with the invention of technical media, which tends to put Africa at the limit of modernity. It has been our task to rethink hegemonic histories and theories of vision from this limit, opening the way to re-theorise the humanities more globally. Visual History therefore explores inter-disciplinary approaches to images as a way of rethinking history, society, and culture.
Graduates of the UWC Visual History programme are making a strong impact on the growing field of global photography studies, such as the 2019 edited volume Ambivalent. Photography and Visibility in African History (https://www.ohioswallow.com/book/Ambivalent). We continue to produce original work that:
- Brings to light the rich and vibrant photographic archives in Africa so as to examine historical and contemporary struggles occurring at the level of the visual
- Articulates new concepts and frameworks that rethink the dominant histories of vision from a strong research site in the south
- Develops new ways of writing about images
- Takes seriously the place of ‘the public’ in wider interdisciplinary debates, examining civil engagement through institutions (such as the museums and galleries) as well as practices around popular arts and media
- Examines the postcolonial African digital turn with its popular and dissident undertones (especially in social media) that express yet another ambivalent wave of the ‘democratization of the image’
- Challenges assumptions about the African continent as a site of raw archives and belated or derivative modernities.
Visual History and Theory considers multiple histories, sciences, and forms of knowledge over time in order to promote the type of critical skills needed to grasp the cultural and political magnitude of dramatically increasing media literacies that are already shaping our future.
Visual History Workshops
The workshops aim to promote and sustain a conversation amongst the growing community of trans-generational scholars engaged in new research in visual
Postgraduate bursaries and postdoctoral fellowships in Visual History & Theory
The Visual History research platform is convened by the DSI/NRF SARChI Chair in Visual History & Theory (UID 98911) and hosts a number of postgraduate student bursaries and postdoctoral fellowships.
Postgraduate Module In Visual History, 2023 (HIS 735/835)
The course offers students the opportunity to become skilled in both the historical and cultural analysis of images, and their production. The focus
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Nsima Udo Wins Africa Thesis Award
Nsima Udo, CHR Doctoral Fellow with the SARChI Chair in Visual History and Theory wins prestigious Africa Thesis Award from the African Studies Centre of the University of Leiden in The Netherlands.
Ambivalent. Photography and Visibility in African History Book Launch
Edited by Patricia Hayes and Gary Minkley
Published by Ohio University Press, 2019
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Visual History and Theory WorkshopPower Remaking selves, archives, environments
This year’s NRF SARChI Chair in Visual History and Theory Workshop will take place between 27-28 July. It coalesces around the title, ‘Power: Remaking selves, archives, environments’, and will include a keynote by Leigh Raiford who is Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies, University of California, Berkeley.
Call for Papers: Visual History and Theory International Workshop: Deep time, shallow time.
Abstracts are invited for participation in the annual workshop in Visual History & Theory to be held at the Centre for Humanities Research, University of the Western Cape, on 19-20 September 2024.
SARChI Chair in Visual History & Theory Review
The SARChI Chair in Visual History & Theory underwent its first-phase review in 2020 and has been awarded a second phase of funding for 2021-5 by the National Research Foundation (NRF).