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Periodical article Periodical article Leiden University catalogue Leiden University catalogue WorldCat catalogue WorldCat
Title:Popular History, Cultural Memory
Author:Coplan, David B.ISNI
Year:2000
Periodical:Critical Arts: A Journal of Media Studies
Volume:14
Issue:2
Pages:122-144
Language:English
Geographic term:South Africa
Subjects:history education
oral history
History and Exploration
Literature, Mass Media and the Press
Architecture and the Arts
Peoples of Africa (Ethnic Groups)
External link:https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02560040085310121
Abstract:Academic departments of history in South Africa, once the leading producers of adversarial and liberating scholarly political discourse, now must face the drastic decline in student enrolments that has resulted from the dis-establishment of history as a separate subject and pedagogical specialization in the schools. Staff reductions are either in process or forestalled only by the diversion of historians' teaching energies into more marketable areas of the university curriculum. Academic narratives of 'what in actuality happened' during the three-and-a-half centuries between the landing of Van Riebeeck and the 1994 elections are not among the forms of knowledge that the Ministry of Education or the ideologists of the 'African Renaissance' see as the basis of social development or nationbuilding in the postapartheid condition. Instead, history as a form of popular discourse and culturally encoded group memory has usurped academic historiography. Public and popular history is foregrounded by such issues as occupancy and power of chieftaincy, land claims, the public sacralization of historical sites, Truth and Reconciliation, and African Renaissance. The rise of popular history and popular historymaking provides an opportunity for the exploration of the relationship between constructions of consciousness and cultural memory. Academic history can only benefit from this exploration. Bibliogr., notes.
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