21/12/2019
Highlights of the African Critical Inquiry Program (ACIP)
In these final weeks of 2019, this series of posts is highlighting the innovative and important work supported by the African Critical Inquiry Program over the last few years. Your gift to the Ivan Karp and Corinne Kratz Fund makes ACIP’s work possible. ACIP supports an annual interdisciplinary workshop and African graduate student research through the Ivan Karp Doctoral Research Awards. Please contribute now at http://www.graduateschool.emory.edu/about/special/acip.html.
In 2017 the ACIP Workshop was “Secret Affinities,” a workshop that sought to rethink the city in Africa through critical readings of Walter Benjamin’s seminal work “Das Passagen-Werk” and a focus on the city of Johannesburg, arguably the ‘African capital of the twenty-first century.’ Sections of Benjamin’s text (known as The Arcades Project in English) facilitated cross-disciplinary discussion related to heritage, architecture and public history practices associated with cities and the African present. The workshop sought to examine the layered urban histories, experiences, transformations and architectural imaginations through particular sites, including Satyagraha House, the venue for the workshop. The workshop included established scholars, artists, architects and postgraduate students as participants, working on projects at the intersections of architecture, public history, spatial planning, heritage and urban studies. The workshop was associated with a reading group that met several times before the workshop and continued for the year after as well. The workshop was organized by Noëleen Murray, Brett Pyper, and Jill Weintroub and took place in Johannesburg in March 2017. They have produced two special issues based on the workshop, one for “Critical African Studies” (forthcoming) and another for “Anthropology Southern Africa” (2019).
You can support more workshops like this by making a gift to the Ivan/Cory Fund to support the African Critical Inquiry Program here: http://www.graduateschool.emory.edu/about/special/acip.html.
