Faculty Writing: On The University of Cape Town Library Fire, and On Structural Gaslighting
In Social Dynamics: a Journal of African Studies, Alírio Karina and co-author Duane Jethro explain why the fire that destroyed the University of Cape Town’s African Studies archives isn’t a complete loss, but an opportunity: to “reconceptualize” the archive and, with it, the very discipline of African Studies. By confining their historical investigation to traditional archives—in a field defined by gaps in the historical record, wrought by colonialism—scholars might preclude more imaginative approaches to knowledge production under conditions of loss. Karina and Jethro, then, see the UCT fire as an opportunity to confront gaps in the official record with new, more realistic, investigative approaches: “How do we incorporate an attention to the vulnerability, fragility of human knowledge, into fields that, like African Studies, hope for the invulnerability of truth as a balm to soften the impact of past injustice?”
Then, writing in the London Review of Books, Sophie Lewis examines Kate Abramson’s new book On Gaslighting. Lewis objects to Abramson’s figuration of gaslighting as primarily gendered—and not racialized; as primarily interpersonal—but not structural. As Lewis observes, “feminists and other social critics have always interrogated individuals and structures at the same time,” but Abramson, in Lewis’s view, doesn’t appear “interested in the ways interpersonal relationships are shaped by institutions.”