Jeudi 30 janvier: Camille Martinerie (Sorbonne Paris Nord), “The same knowledge under different stars?” – Cross-examining history teaching in the South African university under apartheid from the other side of power”
This paper is interested in the political and epistemological understandings of decolonisation – that is, the psycho-cultural dimensions of colonialism, which outlived itself notably through the production of “colonial knowledge” as a means of conquest within institutions, and more specifically universities. My point of entry is a a long-standing debate in South African historiography about the decolonisation of history resulting from the erosion white settler minority’s dominant stronghold on academic norms, appointments and traditions in South Africa in the 1990s. This retrospective study of academic history proposes to capture the different dimensions and layers of “colonial knowledge” as a discursive formation using the University of Cape Town (UCT) – a historically white English-speaking institution – as a case study. Based a detailed discursive analysis of history examination questions triangulated with oral testimonies from black university students, the study exposes the ideological and epistemological biases that have influenced historical education and narrative construction within this prominent academic institution, internationally known for its opposition to the regime.
Camille Martinerie is a course convener and researcher at University Sorbonne Paris Nord (France) where she teaches British and Commonwealth history. She holds a joint PhD degree in African and Anglophone Studies from the University of Cape Town (South Africa) and Aix-Marseille Université (France). Her research interests revolve around African Studies, intellectual histories of decolonisation, historiography and higher education in (post)colonial contexts. Her next project looks at the social and intellectual trajectories of black South African scholars in exile as part of a wider seminar project on South-North political, intellectual and artistic circulations in the post-Bandung era. More information available here: https://calenda.org/1122619