Podcast Episode Summary

Podcast: New Books Network
Host: Jen Hoyer
Guest: Julia Rensing
Episode: Troubling Archives: History and Memory in Namibian Literature and Art
Date: September 25, 2025
Book: Troubling Archives: History and Memory in Namibian Literature and Art (Transcript Publishing, 2025)

Overview of the Episode

This episode centers on Julia Rensing’s book, Troubling Archives, which examines how Namibian and South African writers and artists navigate the complex legacies of colonialism by confronting, challenging, and reimagining archival silences. The discussion explores the fraught nature of archives in the context of history, memory, and trauma, highlighting creative responses—literary, visual, and personal—to what (and how) archives do and do not preserve.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Julia Rensing’s Background and Path to the Book

• Personal & Academic Trajectory:
  Julia is German and works as a lecturer and postdoctoral researcher at the University of Basel’s Center for African Studies.
• Early Influences:
  Family connections to Cape Town ignited her interest in Southern African histories, colonialism, and postcolonial theory.
• Motivation:
  She was struck by the disparity in the acknowledgment of German colonialism between Namibia (where it is ever-present) and Germany (where it is underacknowledged).

  “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.” (04:33, Julia Rensing)

2. Engaging with Namibian Archives: Personal Encounters

• First Encounters:
  A tightly intertwined journey through visits, family discussions, literature, autobiographical accounts, and exposure to a family estate archive.
• The Estate Archive Experience:
  Julia received boxes of uncatalogued materials connected to a German settler woman (“Frauenstein”).
• Resonances with Literature:
  She draws connections between this family archive and Andre Brink’s The Other Side of Silence, using these as case studies for the “resonances” between archive and fiction.
• Troubling the Archive:
  Realization that archives—especially those collected through colonial practices—are deeply biased and incomplete, prompting a turn to creative methods for deeper truths.

3. Types of Artistic and Literary Works Studied

• Case Studies:
  Julia’s book analyzes four case studies, plus a fifth cross-examination with Brink’s book and archive, all sharing the central concern of the archive’s limits and potentials.
• Materials Explored:
  Autobiographical texts, multi-media artworks, and family archives.
  • Ulla Dentlinger’s “Where Are You From? Playing White Under Apartheid”
  • Shiva Trudi Amulungu’s “Taming My Elephant”
  • Visual art by Vitjitua Njarina, Nicola Brandt, Tuli Mekondjo, Imke Rust
• Functions of Photographs:
  Photographs used as both evidence and as problematically constructed objects—sites for critical and creative intervention.

  “The case studies are all very much about the limits of archives and the failure of archives to provide truth or knowledge...and also on creative methods to move beyond a mere critique of archives, but to find ways of producing knowledge otherwise, so to say.” (21:40, Julia Rensing)

4. The Ethic of Care in Engaging Archives

• Definition and Context:
  Originates in debates about museum restitution and ownership, emphasizing access, belonging, and centering linked communities.
• Artistic Ethics:
  Artists approach photographs as portals to ancestors, practicing sensitivity for subjects as kin and honoring them through protective strategies.
• Family Narratives:
  Care becomes an imperative, especially when personal archives and family secrets are opened up for public engagement.

  “Their care and concern really lie fully with the photographed subjects... approaching the photographed subjects as possible ancestors... 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.” (27:33, Julia Rensing)

5. Gender and Archives

• Gendered Labor:
  The maintenance and narration of family archives is predominantly undertaken by women, both as labor and as a means of constructing histories of belonging.
• Colonial Contexts:
  Emphasizes the intersection of gender, race, and class—especially as white settler women’s archives sought to justify presence in colonial societies.
• Artistic Self-Insertion:
  Some women artists place themselves in their work to interrogate and distance themselves from inherited myths.

  “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.” (31:01, Julia Rensing)

6. Artistic vs. Scholarly Engagement with Archives

• Role of Emotion:
  Artists embrace the gaps, cracks, and traumatic silences—chasing emotional truths and multidirectional memories, not just factual recovery.
• Limits of Historiography:
  Where history as a discipline strives for factual accountability, art leans into the imagination of history and the emotional hauntings of the past.
• Key Quotation:

  “The authors and artists in my book... do not give in to the myth of reconstructing a ‘true’ version of the past. I feel that they rather do the opposite. They really question what is broadly considered or accepted as knowledge of the past.” (37:29, Julia Rensing)

7. Implications Beyond Namibia: Decolonizing Knowledge and Archival Practices

• Extrapolation:
  Julia advocates for “toppling knowledge hierarchies”, diversification of what counts as archives, and foregrounding emotional and creative knowledges.
• Questions for Museums and Institutions:
  Challenges Western institutions to reform by centering new modes of knowledge and interrogating their epistemic frameworks.

  “If they want to foster other dialogues,... should they then not maybe center other practices and other ways of making knowledge?... It’s food for thought, I think. It doesn’t give definite answers.” (42:03, Julia Rensing)

8. Future Research: Ethics of Care and Empathy in Representing Violence

• Next Projects:
  Julia is continuing to explore “care” and “empathy”—critiquing their limits, especially in public responses to violence such as the ongoing war in Gaza.
• Inspired by Aruna D’Souza:
  Questions the passivity of empathy and considers art’s role in visualizing suffering without re-traumatization.

  “In a way, it’s also, as she [D’Souza] 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.” (45:21, Julia Rensing)

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On archival asymmetry:
  “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.” (04:01, Julia Rensing)

• On family archives as emotional labor:
  “It is a labor of love... But then in the colonial context, this also has a lot to do with class and race concerns and aspirations.” (31:32, Julia Rensing)

• On creative reclamation:
  “They developed strategies to challenge this ongoing visual exposure. They develop alternative ways of engaging these images.” (19:51, Julia Rensing)

• On what art can do differently:
  “[Artists] aspire to renegotiate how multidirectional memories are haunting the present, to address how colonial histories are multi layered...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.” (38:40, Julia Rensing)

• On reimagining 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?” (41:09, Julia Rensing)

• On the limitations of empathy:
  “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... a passive response, because the emotion stays with the person witnessing. They are not forced to act.” (45:21, Julia Rensing)

Timestamps for Important Segments

• 05:10 Julia on the striking presence/absence of German colonialism in Namibia vs. Germany.
• 07:00-14:00 Julia’s experience with the estate archive and resonance with Andre Brink’s novel.
• 15:47 Overview of the artistic/literary works and materials analyzed.
• 19:45 Discussion of photographic archives and their challenge by artists.
• 25:23 Explanation of the “ethic of care” and artistic engagement with ancestral archives.
• 30:54 Gender and family archives, with examples from visual artists interrogating inherited myths.
• 35:35 Artistic vs. scholarly approaches to archives and their limits.
• 40:39 Broader implications: decolonizing knowledge, diversifying archival practices.
• 43:56 Julia’s upcoming work: care, empathy, and representation of violence.
• 46:49 Closing acknowledgments.

Further Resources

• Artists/Authors discussed:

  • Vicjitua Njarina
  • Nicola Brandt
  • Tuli Mekondjo
  • Imke Rust
  • Ulla Dentlinger
  • Shiva Trudi Amulungu

• Book Highlighted:
  Troubling Archives: History and Memory in Namibian Literature and Art by Julia Rensing (Transcript Publishing, 2025, open access)

This summary captures the rich thematic structure and vivid exchanges of the episode, making Julia Rensing’s insights accessible to listeners and readers interested in archives, memory, decolonization, and the artistic renegotiation of history.