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“Apartheid—The Global Itinerary”: The Journey Ends

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by Louise Bethlehem -- As our research project draws to a close, I thought I would revisit some of its founding assumptions and reflect on its findings and consequences. In my blog entry on this platform (December 2016), I wrote of how I came to the conclusion that: “Apartheid moved things.” Indeed, the conceptual foundations of the research project that emerged there were bound up with displacement—my own voluntary displacement from apartheid South Africa certainly, but much more significantly, the myriad forms of exile, internal banishment and migration associated with the apartheid regime. Taking the South African government’s exiling of political activists, intellectuals, writers, photographers, and musicians as one point of departure, the project tracked the outward trajectories of South African cultural agents and cultural formations beyond the borders of that country in order to investigate how apartheid functioned as a catalyst for transnational cultural production.  Against ac
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Interview with Kier Schuringa, Dutch Anti-Antipartheid Activist

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by Louise Bethlehem and Roni Mikel Arieli -- Kier Schuringa served as a full-time activist in the Dutch Anti-Apartheid and southern Africa solidarity movement from the early 1970s until its dissolution in 1994. He subsequently coordinated the Library, Information and Documentation Center of the Netherlands Institute for Southern Africa (NIZA). He joined the International Institute of Social History in 2008, working with its southern African collection which was transferred from NIZA that year. He was interviewed by Louise Bethlehem and Roni Mikel Arieli on 25 January 2017. The interview has been edited slightly for clarity. Anti Apartheid Demonstration, Amsterdam, 1985. Sjakkelien Vollebregt / Anefo [CC0] Louise Bethlehem: First of all, thank you for agreeing to talk to us. Let us begin perhaps from the story of your personal involvement in the anti-apartheid movement here in the Netherlands, and then move through those experiences to ask you what it means for you as an archivist [at t
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Looking Back

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by Karin Berkman -- It is difficult to condense my understanding of the contribution of the ERC project, “Apartheid— the Global Itinerary: South African Cultural Formations in Transnational Circulation,” both to my personal development as a researcher, and I hope to the field of South African studies. While the focus of my research has been South African exilic literature, the structuring of the project has meant that my area of study was integrated into an ever-ramifying historical scrutiny of apartheid South Africa in its global context. My attempts to trace the singularity of literary production outside of South Africa within the framework of exile have unfolded alongside and under the impact of the work of other researchers. working in different disciplines. The model of dissemination and diffusion that the principal investigator, Louise Bethlehem, has proposed for the object of study – South African expressive culture in transnational circulation—can in effect be applied to the st
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