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Julia Rensing, "Troubling Archives: History and Memory in Namibian Literature and Art" (Transcript Publishing, 2025)
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Julia Rensing
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Julia Rensing
Cause there's always something new.
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Julia Rensing
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Julia Rensing
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Julia Rensing
Network.
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Jen Hoyer
Welcome to New Books Network. My name is Jen Hoyer and today I'm speaking with Julia Rensing, author of Troubling History and Memory in Namibian Literature and Art. I want to highlight for listeners that this book is available open access. It was published in June 2025 by transcript as a brief introduction to the book Namibia's colonial history casts a long shadow over the country's present. Contemporary authors and artists confront the legacies of German and South African colonial rule and engage creatively with the persistent remnants of the past in their works. The archive remains both an invaluable and fraught resource for accessing obscured histories. In Troubling Archives, Julia Renzing examines how writers and artists from Namibia and South Africa navigate archival silences, omissions, and power structures to renegotiate historical narratives and address intergenerational trauma, and I'm so pleased to be speaking today with author Julia Renzing. Julia, welcome to New Books Network.
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Julia Rensing
Hi Jen, thanks for having me here. And thanks for introducing me and my book.
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Jen Hoyer
Absolutely. So before we start talking about the book, I would love if you could share a little bit about yourself for listeners. Maybe a Little bit about your background, the kind of path your education has taken, and the work that you're doing now.
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Julia Rensing
Yeah, sure. Thank you. As you said, my name is Julia Rensing, and I'm from Germany, where I also live, and I'm a lecturer and postdoctoral researcher at the center for African Studies at the University of Basel in Switzerland. And I would say that my point of contact with themes and fields such as postcolonial theory, the histories of Southern Africa, knowledge production, the archive and memory, were through family relations, because my aunt and uncle had moved to Cape Town many, many years ago. And I'm quite close to them, as well as to my cousins who were born there. And it was through them and through the conversations we had and family visits to Cape Town that I was introduced to the histories of colonialism and slavery of the apartheid regime and the long shadow that these histories cast on the present. And it was quite early on that I was irritated, maybe, or unsettled about how this history has not been adequately in history lessons at school or in my school curriculum, to be more precise. So I started centering postcolonial theory and related themes in my own research and then later in my studies at university. And that's also where I began to engage more deeply with German colonialism and its legacies today. And then it was on my first visit to Namibia, which was in the framework of an internship, and that I felt very shocked and haunted by the asymmetry, I would say, in which German colonialism, for example, is very present in the country compared to the way it's forgotten, played down, or ignored or unacknowledged in Germany still today. And as a side note, of course, a lot has happened there, and in the political sphere, there's more debate on that, but not to the extent I would say, as it should be present and it should be known. And that asymmetry led me to center these often called in quotation but entangled histories of Namibia, Germany, but also Southern Africa in general, South Africa and Angola in my research and later in my PhD research. And I was very fortunate to do so at the center for African Studies in Basel, which is also where I still work today.
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Jen Hoyer
Amazing. Thank you. Yeah, I mean, the presence of German colonialism, having visited Namibia once, there are so many things that stand out. But just I remember going into restaurants and being presented with, like, incredibly extensive German menus and thinking how. How I had no idea, and the continued presence of that there, which we don't talk about when we, in my experience, learning, learning about the history of colonialism in Africa and the present impact of that. So let's talk more about this book in Troubling Archives. You're really examining how Namibian artists engage with and respond to archives that are connected with the country's history. Can you talk about how you first encountered that work? Was it through this internship that you mentioned or other visits?
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Julia Rensing
Yeah, it links to two things that I said before. So first of all, with my aunt, and very prominently, because we have always been sharing book recommendations and we discussed literature and art together, we went to exhibitions together. And. Sorry, I have always been drawn to how literature but also artworks work as avenues to. To open a view onto the past or to teach viewers and readers about socioeconomic relations, social tangents or traumatic experiences, et cetera. And this is, of course, because their evocations and the effects are very different to how historical texts or analysis work. They touch us very differently. And so, yes, the second link is what you just mentioned. So during that first visit to Namibia, I found myself completely immersed in the country's history through books, because this is how I sought to find an understanding. And it was mainly through autobiographical accounts I remember that I tried to understand or learn more about the history. And I feel they always also catch my attention for the very personal tone or the way they teach readers about a very complex past through micro history. So through the eyes of someone sharing their own perspective and lived experiences. And during that time, I really eagerly devoured anything I could get my hands on while I was in the country. And I was very captivated by the power of these stories to shed light on a deeply layered history. So it's not only German colonial rule, right? It's the country is shaped by two consecutive occupying powers. There was first German colonial rule that included a genocide, and then South African occupation that included apartheid. And these books stayed with me for how they can unpack what this colonial complex history means or how it continues to shape the present and so on. And then there was a very crucial moment that geared my attention more to the role of archives and knowledge production on colonial histories. And I want to speak a little bit about that because I think it was very central to. To this theme that I chose with my book. And that was when I was still working at the University of Freiburg. My former PhD supervisor approached me to ask whether I had any use for a completely underexplored, unordered, and actually very chaotic family estate from a formerly German family that had migrated to German southwest Africa. But he had actually no context info on it. It was from his friend, who was an Angelican priest. And he was living in Pretoria at the time, but was about to move and had no use for the material, since he was almost entirely unaware of the family connections of that material, because most of his family members died early. So nobody could really translate the meaning of the things that he still owned to him. And these masses of material almost felt like a burden to him. And I was very curious and said, yeah, sure, okay, please send it along. And then many weeks later, I received large boxes full of letters, photographs, documents and so on. And they arrived one after the other at very irregular intervals at my office. And they were filled with so much material that soon became clear to be connected to one central woman, a German settler woman who migrated to what was then German southwest Africa in 1898. And why this is important or where this led me, I'm just going to speak a little bit more about the context. So in these first moments that I opened the boxes, I was pulling out letter after letter and was immediately captured by one name that reoccurred on all of these pieces of text or on documents, on photos, on the back of a photograph. And that was the name Frauenstein. And I was struck by the name because it's a direct link to a very dark and brutal book I had once read before. Again, it was a recommendation by my aunt. And this book haunted me for many weeks, in actually by now, years. And that's the Other side of Silence by South African author Andre Brink. And the Other side of Silence is a fictional story that centers also a young German woman who settles in German Southwest Africa and who's abused, violated, exploited and rejected in the societies in both the colony as well as in the German empire. And there were many, what I call in my book, resonances between this estate and between the book. So unlikely connections, fragments and clues that figured throughout my research and through my cross reading of estate and book. So I unpack these in detail in my book in troubling archives, but just to flag. So the former estate owner, too, was also in an economically very weak position. She was an orphan, just like the protagonist in the book, and she moved to the colony in search of a better life. And Frauenstein, in both women's stories, so to say, was the place where both women lived. So there was a place, Frauenstein and Andre Brink's book. And in the estate, Frauenstein was the home of the former estate owner. And it was also the place where very horrific and traumatic and violent events would play out. And importantly, Brink was known to work with archives, too. So he's known to study historical documents, letters, and photographs. And this is where he kind of seeks out inspiration for his work, or actually the inspirations find him and so on. And then he engages with oral histories, with other secondary sources and so on. But then he would fictionalize those clues that he finds. And I also turned to his archive. So the documents and notes and so on he took during this research that he did on German southwest Africa, on women migration, and on Frauenstein. And I would find more and more resources between both women's experiences. And these, again, what I call resonances in the book really gripped me and wouldn't let go. I kind of became absorbed in studying these two archives, Brink's archive and the settler woman's archives, to try to piece together how they connect and to understand their context, but also to understand their differences. And in that process, I realized that in my research, I very much relied on, so to say, conventional archives. So historical archives, official archives, private archives, and those were mainly those built by the white settler society, because this links to power practices of empire. Right? This desire to gather knowledge, to document knowledge and so on. And so these are really the epistemological foundations of these archives. And it's what I call in the book, the trouble with the archives. That's the troubling nature. So it kind of dawned on me during that research how everything I thought I was learning was a construction and was biased on so many levels. And I realized that history can't really be reconstructed based on such troubling archives alone, or not even at all, actually. And so, again, I kind of turned to literature and art to learn more and to find out about authors and artists responses to archives in general and then to the epistemological foundations of archives to find out, do they matter at all for them, do they turn to other archives? How do they respond? And I engaged more closely with how creative practitioners were troubling archives. So I'm using these double meanings of the word troubling archives. I'm thinking about the ways, how they contest, challenge, or expand archives, so how they negotiate the past, where conventional archives really fall short of helping. So what do they then produce? Or how do they intervene with conventional archives, or do they turn to other archives for these projects? Yeah. And what I encountered along the way has been truly inspiring for me, not only because I really liked. I really learned a lot from these artistic and literary projects, but also because I got to meet the people behind these projects and got to have A lot of conversations with them about these topics that I find very important also in relation to broader questions about knowledge production.
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Jen Hoyer
Yeah, thank you so much for sharing all of that. Those connections, I mean, the way things kind of fall into place, seemingly coincidentally, in a way that just inspires so much. Really fascinating and I think fulfilling. Often research is. It's pretty incredible. So I want to talk about some of the main questions and main themes that your book explores through the different case studies of art and artists that you present. But before we get to those themes, could you give listeners a few examples or a bit of an overview of the types of artwork you examined in your research? Because you've mentioned literature, but it's not all literature that you discuss.
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Julia Rensing
Yeah, of course. Thank you. So, to begin with, I would say that what connects the works I look at, and it's four case studies in total, with this fifth kind of cross examination with Brink's book and the archive that I worked on. But what connects all of these works is an interest in archives as a window to the past to negotiate history and its impact on the present. And I say interest, although I'm being aware that it sounds so positive. It's also, in a way, a predicament. You have to turn to the archive in some regards to learn about history. And I remember my supervisor, Nomu Samakubu, was very important in really unpacking this for me, that there's a sort of predicament and need that is not a positive one at times to return to archives. And again, so I understand archive as a broad and flexible category here, because that's really something that the artworks and the text push for. And another, so to say, shared element or connection is that they're all troubling archives, as I mentioned before, in the form of a renegotiation, a challenging, a confronting and contesting of problematic resources. So they all respond critically to archives, for example, in the form of creative archival interventions, or in the form of a production of counter archives or alternative archives, or also in the form that they reject conventional archives altogether. And while I take this broad view of what an archive can be, a common threat across the case studies is the role of photographic archives. And these photographs in the projects take very different form and they serve distinct functions. So I want to give you a few more examples by referencing the case studies, because then I think it becomes a bit more clear or graspable. So I mentioned earlier that autobiographical accounts were really key sources for my learning about Namibian history. And there were two texts that I decided then to focus on in my research because they were just so important also in my thinking about these questions of knowledge production and archive. And those are Ula Dendlinger's Where Are you From? Playing White Under Apartheid? And Shiva Trudy Amolungu's Taming My Elephant. And I found them important because they both, in a way, offer important correctives to dominant national narratives that continue to shape Namibian historiography. I would say so. For example, the liberation struggle is often framed as a heroic and unified battle for freedom. And here, Chiwa Amulungu's personal narratives provides a much more complex and kind of intimate perspective. And if you take it together with Dentlinger's book. So both of their books allow us to see how two women, although their life paths were very, very different, experienced deep forms of uprootedness and identity struggles, and how they were always confronted with this need to constantly renegotiate what it means to be Namibian after independence. And photographs in both works are important, which we can see, because they are very carefully selected and gathered and reprinted, not just as illustrations, but also as part of a strategy to try to reassemble an archive of one's history, so to say, and as a strategy also to respond to a scarcity of documentation about their personal and communal pasts, and in this way to kind of also actively claim space in the Namibian memory landscape. I would say, and I think this latter point, the aspect of memory is also connection to the artworks that I look at, and those are the creative projects by Vicitua and Jarina Nicola Brandt, Tulli Mekonjo and Imke Roost. And all of these works, I would say photographs, in a way, serve as portals to question a troubling past, again, a kind of window to question a troubling past. And they use photographs in their multimedia work as raw material that allows them to probe alternative memory practices. You see this in the way that the selected artists interrogate public or private archives, and that they, in doing so, turn inwards. And they examine their own implications and entanglements in colonial histories or histories, plural. But they also make political commentaries too. So we can look, for example, at Vicituanjarina and Tully Mekanjo's multimedia practices. Both work with historical photographs, and they incorporate them into their multi layered paintings. And the photographs they use are often from the colonial era, not exclusively, but as one example here, now to speak a little bit about their work. And they question the uses of these historical images because they are very much aware that these were always Taken most of the times, taken within distinct power structures. So these historical images are connected to a visual regime in which it was predominantly white male photographers who took the images of colonized subjects, often without their consent, and they were often staging and framing people and again also structurally speaking, often women in a certain way and in a very stylized way that followed ethnographic and anthropological modes of representation. And these artists, Njarina and Mikonjo, they developed strategies to challenge this ongoing visual exposure. They develop alternative ways of engaging these images. And I think this is very important when it comes to knowledge production with or against the archive. And earlier I spoke about my own archival research on the family estate in connection to Brink's book. And here also it was quite central in my reflection to engage with questions about the uses of photography and ask how is it possible to generate knowledge with photographic archives in the first place? And what do these images do that I found? What do they reveal or do they conceal much more than they explain or show, you know? So the case studies are all very much about the limits of archives and the failure of archives to provide truth or knowledge and truth and quotation marks, and also on creative methods to move beyond a mere critique of archives, but to find ways of producing knowledge otherwise, so to say.
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Julia Rensing
Absolutely.
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Jen Hoyer
And I love that perspective of moving beyond just critique of what the archive can't do and thinking about how I can be productive and generative. That's the thing I think a lot about. So one of the themes that really stood out to me as I was reading your book is how an ethic of care is used in engaging with archives. Can you explain for any listeners who aren't familiar with that term, what this means? And then how you've seen artists practice an ethic of care when they engage with some of this archival material?
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Julia Rensing
Yeah, I think we may link this to debates around museums and restitution and ownership, et cetera, that have been really prominent in the political and cultural spheres, so to say, and in these debates. Scholars, but also activists and cultural workers have increasingly called for an ethics of care in museum and archival practices, and for them this implies, for example, the following it applies to question who are the people who should have access to the material? Who are the communities that feel a connection to the objects or ethnographic or sacred Things, for the lack of a better word, because these are not just objects and they are often subsumed as that. But yeah, who are the communities that feel connections to what is stored in museum repositories or in archives more generally, that are usually located in the global north and in these contexts. And ethics of care implies centering the individuals and communities that claim a connection to the material. And this is essential to reform museum policies to provide access, to facilitate restitution in the first place, and to offer insights into what is actually stored in European institutions, so that claims for restitution can become possible. If people don't know what's being held there, they can't claim it back. And I think there's an important link here to the artists in my case studies, because they really address these asymmetries and possibilities to access archives and produce knowledge on the past based on conventional archives. A, because such archives are located elsewhere, or B because their repositories are not open to the public. I mean, both are really boundaries to making archives useful. So what these artists do is that they call for an intervention with photographic archives. And beyond restitution or access question, this actually implies confronting and disrupting and undoing their problematic modes of representation that I have outlined earlier with regards to photographic archives. And for the artist, I think, or I felt in my case studies that their ethics or their care and concern really lie fully with the photograph photographed subjects. And again, I want to make a reference to Tuli Mikandra and Vijitwa Njarina. I found it so eye opening that both of them said to me that they are approaching the photographed subjects as possible ancestors when they work with photographic material. So they kind of envision that the people that they see could be their distant relatives, their forefathers. And I think this sensitivity, this care for the photographed subjects changes something in how we think about access, ownership and claims of belonging when it comes to archives. Because if you think it through, so if the people in the photographs are the artists ancestors, shouldn't then they be the target group to access the repositories in which the images are stored? Or shouldn't they be considered as the potentially rightful owners of the material, and then also who's to decide on how and under what conditions the images are to be seen? So I think in that sense, the works by these artists are not only important for discourses around archival gatekeeping and the politics of restitution, but also about how care can be practiced. Because I think this care and this sensitivity really informs their strategies of showing Concealing and protecting the photographed subjects visually. And I just can, so to say, invite you to google their works or to look at their works. They're really these very sensitive visual languages to make the images useful, but to protect or honour or celebrate the photograph subjects in their works. But there are also other dimensions of care in the case studies that I'm discussing that I just want to briefly mention here to give another example. For many of the artists also, the authors, care also implies a sense of responsibility that is assumed for a complex family history and for the responsibility that comes when you open a private family archive or family history to a broader public. Because there then codes of secrecy and confidentiality and privacy are actually being disrupted. Family archives aren't compiled or intended for a broader public actually. And many of the artism authors grapple with that when they develop their work. So their care for them is also an imperative, something that they have to address and negotiate when they engage with their personal histories creatively.
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Jen Hoyer
Such a thorough and yeah, really terrific glimpse into what these artists are doing. And I'll see if we can link in the episode notes, link to some of the. Some examples of the artist's work so folks can check that out. Another theme that I kept spotting while I was reading your book is the theme of gender. For example, you refer a few times to how many of the family archives used in the work you study were created and cared for by women. But that's just one example of how gender comes up. And I would love if you could share a few examples of how issues of gender emerged in the work you studied and how artists are engaging with gender.
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Julia Rensing
Yeah, yeah, sure. This was an aspect that I think to a certain degree began troubling me or unsettling me because it made me realize that family memory, family narratives, family identity making and the passing on of family history is very much a gendered labor. One that seems to be assigned to or taken up almost exclusively by women. And I think like structurally we might question here, you know, or we often come to that conclusion. If we just question that who does the photographing, the selecting, the designing of photo albums, who's creating which images go to the walls, but also who takes upon themselves the task for documenting, archiving letters, personal items and whatnot? It's often women. And it is a labor of love for many or for most of the people who do that, I think to pass on something to loved ones in order to kind of feel a sense of connection, to build family relation. But it's also a projection into the Future. It's kind of a project of hope that the family construction prevails, I think. But then in the colonial context, this also has a lot to do with class and race concerns and aspirations. So in white settler families, again, structurally speaking, photographic work and photo albums also helped to build a kind of claim of belonging to your place, having built a home there, raised a family there, to build kind of a documentation of that, of having settled there and built something that is of substance, maybe, that remains, you know, and we saw that, or I felt this was very critically interrogated by Imco Roost, for example, who interrogates her grandmother's family estate critically. And she questions how the grandmother worked to uphold a kind of family narrative and knowledge of family history through passing on of objects and photographs amongst generation and amongst women particularly. And it was through gathering and archiving and documenting and just passing on of that generated private archive that the grandmother strived to construct a sentiment of belonging to the settler colony or strive to pass on a kind of knowledge. Again, also in quotation mark, what kind of knowledge is this? Right. Of where the family came from and how the family came to build this new belonging in the colony. And Ingerust really works out how this was very much a construction, that family life actually has been ruptured multiple times throughout the years. And the artist really questions that, and in this way works through her desire to understand and also unpack family myths that were being constructed through archives and photographic interventions. I think allows artists, for example Rust, in this case, to also distance themselves or herself from inherited identity constructions and myths and rituals and practices, and to question these claims of belonging that are often made through archival practices. And it was both Inkarus, but also Nicola Brandt, whose works I interrogate, who then decide to insert themselves in their artworks as objects of interrogation. So you find them in the photographs or inserted into multimedia art. And through that, they kind of offer a critical lens both at the self and at family narratives or broader. Maybe also family memory cultures or inherited memory cultures, too.
- [34:41]
Jen Hoyer
And then you've mentioned a little bit your own work with this personal archive and how you spent a lot of time examining that, and also this book by Andre Brink. So then a question that you explored in the last chapter is how artistic and scholarly engagement with archives differences and share ground. This was super fascinating to me as someone who spends a lot of time with archives, often in scholarly contexts, sometimes in creative contexts. And I hadn't thought about what these two different types of engagement can do. So could you describe your own archival project, a Little more as well. You've already talked about Andre Brink's book a little bit. And can you talk about the similarities and differences and what you think scholarship and art can do with archival material and archival narratives?
- [35:35]
Julia Rensing
Yeah, I mean, I'm of course, aware that scholarship and creative practices are two very different forms of labor that come with certain codes and constraints and freedoms. Artistic freedom, of course, is something that scholarly research does not have to the same extent. And I mentioned that earlier, that as you also flagged it just now, during my own research on the family estate, I was an archival researcher, just by virtue of doing that task, so to say. And I questioned and engaged more deeply with Andre Brink's method to reimagine the history of Frauenstein, seeing that he started off as an archival researcher, too. And he built that archive where I could retrace the sources that he used and so on. But then he went somewhere else with his fictionalizing of the gaps and the omissions and the cracks that he found or that he encountered along the way in the archive. And that kind of confronted me quite directly with this fine line that divided conventional or accepted historiography and the imagination of history. And just to reference here, I mean, somebody who's quite known to speak about this fine line or the divide is American historian Hayden White, who has argued quite prominently that history, or any historical text, is actually also just a form of narration and thus a form of literary construction, but within history as a discipline. I mean, while his point, I think, has gained much more acceptance by now, but still within the discipline of history, there is still a kind of push back against overly critical stance. There's a kind of holding onto the idea of factuality, perhaps kind of driven by a desire to understand the past the way it really was. If you just study it closely, you can get to the gist of how things unfolded. This is kind of the hope that. That keeps historians active, I think. And at the same time, there is a heightened understanding and sensitivity towards the fallibility of archives and of the inconsistencies of metanarratives, too. But I would argue that, nevertheless, a certain source hierarchy prevails. So researchers, to me, remain driven by a kind of quest for alleged. Allegedly undiscovered in quotation mark facts in archival repositories that would allow them to excavate forgotten pasts and would allow them to reconstruct concealed history that haven't been written or found before, you know, and then only from there, they would incorporate or visit other archives, whatever that means. But they would perhaps include oral narratives, or they would, yeah, I don't know, look at other sources that are not, not stored in conventional repositories, for instance. And the authors and artists in my book, I would argue, do not give in to the myth of reconstructing a true version of the past. Again in quotation mark. I feel that they rather do the opposite. They really question what is broadly considered or accepted as knowledge of the past. And this is also what's troubling them, that there needs to be something corrected or maybe enriched or expanded about how the past is being dealt with. With. And I felt that the driving forces in their project seemed to be much more emotional. So they aspired to renegotiate how multidirectional memories are haunting the present, to address how colonial histories are multi layered and maybe often also not follow a linear logic, which is something historians would definitely do. Right. And they renegotiate how traumatic experience connected to these colonial histories remained troubling and how they remain passed on transgenerationally, for example. Or they look at the way in which knowledge and experiences are connected to bodies and landscapes and how through that, bodies and landscapes actually also become archives of trauma too. And I think that this emotional dimension is something that really marks the importance of the artworks and autobiographical accounts for me, because they teach us that the ghost and the wound and the hauntings of the past call for our attention and that they need our empathetic reading and listening. And they teach us that this is where we should place our emphasis and our care to bring back that term we had earlier, instead of prioritizing these allegedly dormant, hidden in quotation mark facts in the archive that want to be retraced.
- [40:07]
Jen Hoyer
Fantastic. Thank you. And I guess as one last question about this book, your work is obviously really connected to Namibian archives, Namibian art and artists, but as a reader, I could see parts of your analysis that could absolutely be extrapolated to other archives and other artistic engagement in other places. So what? Maybe this is a big question to ask of you to extrapolate this, but what do you think some of the key takeaways might be for those working with archives elsewhere?
- [40:39]
Julia Rensing
Yeah, I think it links well to the question we had before, because for me finishing this book, I felt that as a researcher, a main takeaway from the authors and artists methods of troubling archives should be that we need to expand our practices of knowledge production, that we must move beyond source critique. So we can't just stay there and say, oh, yeah, okay, but these archives that I drew this from are limited or biased, but we really have to topple knowledge hierarchies altogether and more consistently or more elaborately, maybe that means we should widen our approaches to what counts as reliable sources or what counts as acceptable archives. And that means it is a kind of diversification of what an archive is and can be. Just to make this, again, a little more graspable, we can refer this to museum discourses again. So perhaps, instead of pivoting around legal questions of what should be restituted, what may still remain exhibited in European institutions, perhaps we should rather begin by asking more seriously, what are the epistemological foundations of these Western institutions and archives? And can these be troubled in the sense of can they be challenged? Can they be reformed? Can they be contested? If yes, then how? And if not, why hold onto these archives at all in the way we seem to be doing now? Would not other sources, texts or works or practices be more suitable to allow for the dialogues that now progressive museums argue that they're aiming to open up? We have a lot of debate about museums are trying to be, again in quotation mark, decolonial, whatever that means for them. But actually, the frameworks that they use and the practices they use stick to these epistemological foundations of archives, and they stick to these traditions and ties that are colonial, actually. So if they want to foster other dialogues, if they want to be progressive with their history and with their practices, should they then not maybe center other practices and other ways of making knowledge? Should that not take center stage in a museum today as an example? It's food for thought, I think. It doesn't give definite answers, but, yeah, I think there's something about this. To topple knowledge hierarchies and center the emotional dimensions, that is important.
- [43:19]
Jen Hoyer
It's an exciting provocation.
- [43:21]
Julia Rensing
I don't know.
- [43:21]
Jen Hoyer
It could create a lot of really amazing new ways of thinking about cultural institutions and the work they do or the work that replaces that kind of institution. Well, before we wrap up this conversation, I do also want to give you a chance to share what you're working on next. I'm really curious if there's other related projects that have emerged from the research on this book or other new projects that you're working on now that you'd like to share about with listeners.
- [43:56]
Julia Rensing
Yeah, thank you. In a way, I'm developing and questioning the discourses on care that we touched upon earlier. And I've been thinking more deeply about the limits and the mechanisms of care. And I would argue that this is strongly connected to the notion of empathy, because empathy is often hailed and celebrated as a very virtuous emotional response and that links directly to care. And currently I'm reflecting a lot on this notion in relation to violent histories and violence that's unfolding in front of our very eyes. While a genocide is being committed in Gaza, for example, there are many more other violent histories right now, but this one, I think, really needs our attention and care, and the world is watching almost every minute of it. And with such heavily mediated injustice and such heavily mediated representations of violence, images may call upon people's empathy on the viewer's emotional reaction to what they see. But then again, we also see that what images show and tell is often also contested and politically framed. And in this regard, I was deeply inspired by Aruna d' Souza's book Imperfect Solidarities, because energy really critiques the role of empathy in contemporary visual culture. Culture. And she argues that the problem is it relies on victimizing, and it centers the person who's doing the witnessing instead of those who are actually suffering. And in a way, it's also, as she says, a passive response, because the emotion stays with the person witnessing. They are not forced to act. They're actually not changing anything if they're being empathetic. Right. And I'm extending this consideration to contemporary art projects that. That try to develop alternative ways to visualize, address, or engage with scenes of injustice and violence without reproducing their terms, which is, of course, extremely difficult because these violences need our attention. But, yeah, there's also very little use in re traumatizing through a renewed representation. And I'm trying to revisit also how empathy is being renegotiated in such projects, so how emotional responses can be ambivalent and also productive and artistically explored. And I kind of feel that in this current moment in time where the media and the political discourses are dominated by so much violence, these questions are just very urgent or very urgent to me also, as a way to kind of provide an opening for what to do and how to respond to the daily violence that we see and how we regard the pain of others, as Susan Suntuck has prominently phrased it. I think we have no answer for this, but would now almost more than ever, really need such an answer.
- [46:50]
Jen Hoyer
Absolutely. Well, thank you so much, Julia. Once again today, I've been speaking with Julia Rensing, author of Troubling History and Memory in Namibian Literature and Art. My name is Jen Hoyer, and you're listening to New Books Network.