C Hamilton
Biographic Data
| ID | 23908 |
|---|---|
| NAME | C Hamilton |
| GIVEN NAMES | C |
| FAMILY NAME | Hamilton |
| SIGNATURE | HAMILTON C |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Cape Town |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1291-4603 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 46 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 245 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 46 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1908 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Rethinking the Political Order in the KwaZulu-Natal Region in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries
The history of the KwaZulu-Natal region in the period under study has mostly been written round the evolution of a series of polities seen as more or less firmly bounded territorial “states.” This approach goes hand in hand with readings of recorded oral source materials as “oral traditions.” In this article, we reread the materials not simply as relayed historical accounts but as evidence of past discursive practices geared towards the navigatio…
Refiguring the Archive for Eras before Writing
In most of Africa there are written materials from the eras before colonialism that offer a view of the kinds of ideas, cultural life, and currents of political thought, as well as practices and events, that predate substantial European engagement. In the present-day South African province of KwaZulu-Natal, and bordering provinces and countries, there are no equivalent discursive materials that predate a European presence. With colonialism, much …
‘The Character and Objects of Chaka’
In a series of papers and articles beginning in 1983, Julian Cobbing has offered a radical, and often provocative, critique of the &s;mfecane&s; as the pivotal concept of the history of the nineteenth century. This chapter focuses on Cobbing&s;s reconstruction of the making of the Shaka myth. My purpose is to disentangle the elaborate weave of Cobbing&s;s powerful insights and implausible conspiracy theories. It also focuses in detail on the 1820…
Moving Beyond Ethnic Framing
In earlier work, we saw the making of social categories in the Zulu kingdom under Shaka, particularly those of ‘amantungwa’ and ‘amalala’, as an example of the development of embryonic ethnic groups. In the present article, we move on from our previous discussion in a number of ways. We reconsider the category of ‘amalala’, pushing back further against the categories of ethnicity that previously dominated socio-political analysis of pre-Shaka chi…
The long southern African past
The long southern African past before the advent of European colonialism remains neglected despite powerful post-apartheid impulses of various kinds for its recovery and celebration. In the last twenty years or so, outside of the specialist discipline of archaeology, there has been relatively little research undertaken to support those impulses. In this paper I offer my understanding of some of the things that have given distinctive shape to this…
Archives, Ancestors and the Contingencies of Time
The Politics of Heritage in Africa
Heritage work has had a uniquely wide currency in Africa's politics. Secure within the pages of books, encoded in legal statutes, encased in glass display cases and enacted in the panoply of court ritual, the artefacts produced by the heritage domain have become a resource for government administration, a library for traditionalists and a marketable source of value for cultural entrepreneurs. The Politics of Heritage in Africa draws together disp…
Forged and Continually Refashioned in the Crucible of Ongoing Social and Political Life
Shaped as much by fractures, uncertainties and changes in contemporary social and political life, the current dilapidation of the South African national archival system is a more complex problem than simply a matter of inefficiency and bias. The paper argues that any attempts to analyse its current situation with a view to changing it, or indeed to understand in any situation why some things are preserved in certain forms, others in other forms, …
Reading across the Divides
This introduction draws attention to the value of a parallel reading of the separately authored articles which follow. It shows how a consideration of historical and archaeological research across the regional divide of south-east and north-west southern Africa unsettles a number of disciplinary orthodoxies, notably notions of distinct Nguni and Sotho identities. Complex political arrangements relating to differential access to economic resources…
Political Centralisation and the Making of Social Categories East of the Drakensberg in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries
This article examines the establishment of social categories in the increasingly centralised polities of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries east of the Drakensberg. It looks at the ways in which cultural and historical materials were used to shore up ideological claims and how they set limits on what could be claimed. Rulers manipulated and managed pre-existing ideas about origins, affiliations and cultural inheritances, as did th…
Becoming Worthy Ancestors
Why does it matter that nations should care for their archives, and that they should develop a sense of shared identity? And why should these processes take place in the public domain? How can nations possibly speak about a shared sense of identity in pluralistic societies where individuals and groups have multiple identities? And how can such conversations be given relevance in public discussions of reconciliation and development in South Africa…
The Cambridge History of South Africa
This book surveys South African history from the discovery of gold in the Witwatersrand in the late nineteenth century to the first democratic elections in 1994. Written by many of the leading historians of the country, it pulls together four decades of scholarship to present a detailed overview of South Africa during the twentieth century. It covers political, economic, social and intellectual developments and their interconnections in a clear a…
Producing media debate
This article examines journalistic practice in relation to the production of debate in the media. By way of examples drawn from South African journalism, we show that the production of opinion, analysis and debate entails a different set of processes from the practices employed in news production. Editors and senior journalists understand the facilitation of debate as an important media responsibility, and intervene in the dynamics of debate in o…
Backstory, Biography, and the Life of the James Stuart Archive
Why explore the life of an archive, and what might it mean to study its “life” as opposed to writing its history? The proposition of an archive having a life is, on the face of it, counter-intuitive. Once safely cloistered in the archive, we imagine that a record, an object or a collection is preserved relatively unchanged for posterity. Under those conditions does it even have an ongoing history worth investigating, let alone a life? The efficac…
Beauty
Journal Article Beauty Get access Beauty Roger ScrutonOXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS. 2009. pp. XI + 223. £10.99 (HBK). Christopher Hamilton Christopher Hamilton King's College London Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The British Journal of Aesthetics, Volume 50, Issue 3, July 2010, Pages 323–327, https://doi.org/10.1093/aesthj/ayq013 Published: 01 July 2010
Thinking aloud/allowed
This article examines the controversy that erupted in 2006 when the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) was accused of banning certain commentators. The ‘blacklisting’ saga surfaced differences in ideas and practices of publicness among the contenders in the controversy and revealed that notions of the public, public accountability and the public interest were contested. The research describes independent newsroom practices conducted in…
Framing essay
Uncertain citizenship and public deliberation in post-apartheid South Africa
The post‐repressive‐regime South African government has actively convened a public sphere bristling with institutions and policies designed to facilitate public deliberation. However, certain apartheid legacies and contemporary political compromises facilitate the reach of power into the convened public sphere, leading to the corralling of public deliberation and the attempted silencing of critical voices. By the end of the Mbeki presidency, a ca…
Potential for abuse in the VCT counselling room
The rapid scale-up of HIV counselling and testing programmes in Kenya has led to quality concerns, including the potential for abuse within the private, confidential setting of client-initiated voluntary counselling and testing (VCT). A qualitative study was conducted in three provinces of Kenya, involving 26 VCT service providers and 13 key informants. First and second hand accounts of emotional, physical and sexual abuse emerged in all three st…
The Role of Public Opinion in the Implementation of International Juvenile Justice Standards
Refiguring the Archive
Carolyn Hamilton, Verne Harris, Jane Taylor, Michele Pickover, Graeme Reid and Razia Saleh(eds), Refiguring the Archive. Cape Town: David Philip (hard covers R 240, ISBN 0 86486 507 4); Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers (hard covers €106.00, US$117.00, £73.00, ISBN 1 4020 0743 4). 2002, 368 pp. - Volume 74 Issue 2
Reaping the whirlwind
In 1988 Reader&s;s Digest pulled off what is probably the publishing coup of the decade in South Africa. Responding to the storm of popular opposition to traditional South African history that blew up in the 1980s, it produced a book that took up the challenge: The Illustrated History of South Africa: the real story . It sold over 85,000 copies within six months of publication and Reader&s;s Digest has battled to keep up &s;with the demand for th…
Arts for health
The potential health benefits of participation in the arts to the person and to the community have received widespread attention in recent years. The arts have been used as a medium for health promotion, as therapeutic interventions, and, in the case of the UK, health action zones and social inclusion partnerships’ arts projects have been specifically used to tackle social exclusion. As with other health care and social interventions, the arts ma…
‘Living by Fluidity’
Collecting the classical world
Of the two values of ancient objects, the connoisseur's first concern is with the object today, and the archaeologist's is with its past place and the knowledge it offers about the past. Central to both is provenance, which comprises the 'archaeology' of the item - its story until it went to rest in the ground - and its 'history' - its story once found and brought to human awareness again. Our response to looting of antiquities depends on how ser…
Museums and Communities
Journal Article Museums and Communities: The Politics of Public Culture. Ed. by Ivan Karp, Christine Mullen Kreamer, and Steven D. Lavine. (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992. X, 614 pp. Cloth, $45.00, ISBN 1-56098-164-4. Paper, $16.95, ISBN 1-56098-189-X.) Get access Carolyn Hamilton Carolyn Hamilton University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar J…
The Making of the AmaLala
The Character and Objects of Chaka’
An important aspect of Julian Cobbing's radical critique of the ‘mfecane’ as the pivotal concept of the history of southern Africa in the nineteenth century is the claim that the image of Shaka-as-monster was an ‘alibi’ invented by Europeans in the 1820s to mask their slaving activities. Reconsideration of this claim reveals that it is based on the misuse of evidence and inadequate periodisation of the earliest representations of Shaka. Examinati…
Collecting the classical world
Of the two values of ancient objects, the connoisseur's first concern is with the object today, and the archaeologist's is with its past place and the knowledge it offers about the past. Central to both is provenance, which comprises the 'archaeology' of the item - its story until it went to rest in the ground - and its 'history' - its story once found and brought to human awareness again. Our response to looting of antiquities depends on how ser…
An Appetite for the Past’
Uncertain citizenship and public deliberation in post-apartheid South Africa
The post‐repressive‐regime South African government has actively convened a public sphere bristling with institutions and policies designed to facilitate public deliberation. However, certain apartheid legacies and contemporary political compromises facilitate the reach of power into the convened public sphere, leading to the corralling of public deliberation and the attempted silencing of critical voices. By the end of the Mbeki presidency, a ca…
Revision; Reaction; RE-Vision; The role of museums in (a) transforming South Africa
Arts for health
The potential health benefits of participation in the arts to the person and to the community have received widespread attention in recent years. The arts have been used as a medium for health promotion, as therapeutic interventions, and, in the case of the UK, health action zones and social inclusion partnerships’ arts projects have been specifically used to tackle social exclusion. As with other health care and social interventions, the arts ma…
Backstory, Biography, and the Life of the James Stuart Archive
Why explore the life of an archive, and what might it mean to study its “life” as opposed to writing its history? The proposition of an archive having a life is, on the face of it, counter-intuitive. Once safely cloistered in the archive, we imagine that a record, an object or a collection is preserved relatively unchanged for posterity. Under those conditions does it even have an ongoing history worth investigating, let alone a life? The efficac…
The long southern African past
The long southern African past before the advent of European colonialism remains neglected despite powerful post-apartheid impulses of various kinds for its recovery and celebration. In the last twenty years or so, outside of the specialist discipline of archaeology, there has been relatively little research undertaken to support those impulses. In this paper I offer my understanding of some of the things that have given distinctive shape to this…
Forged and Continually Refashioned in the Crucible of Ongoing Social and Political Life
Shaped as much by fractures, uncertainties and changes in contemporary social and political life, the current dilapidation of the South African national archival system is a more complex problem than simply a matter of inefficiency and bias. The paper argues that any attempts to analyse its current situation with a view to changing it, or indeed to understand in any situation why some things are preserved in certain forms, others in other forms, …
Reaping the Whirlwind
The Mfecane Aftermath
The Trade Relations Between England and India (1600-1896)
The Future of the Past
(1996). The Future of the Past: New Trajectories. South African Historical Journal: Vol. 35, No. 1, pp. 146-148
The Swaziland Oral History Project
In 1985 an oral history project was established in Swaziland, based in the National Archives at Lobamba. The Oral History Project set itself three tasks; the establishment of an oral archive on Swazi history; the publication of a selection of transcripts form the oral archive concerning the precolonial history of Swaziland; the popularization of precolonial history. The precolonial history of Swaziland is the history of a largely non–literate peo…
Refiguring the Archive for Eras before Writing
In most of Africa there are written materials from the eras before colonialism that offer a view of the kinds of ideas, cultural life, and currents of political thought, as well as practices and events, that predate substantial European engagement. In the present-day South African province of KwaZulu-Natal, and bordering provinces and countries, there are no equivalent discursive materials that predate a European presence. With colonialism, much …
Moving Beyond Ethnic Framing
In earlier work, we saw the making of social categories in the Zulu kingdom under Shaka, particularly those of ‘amantungwa’ and ‘amalala’, as an example of the development of embryonic ethnic groups. In the present article, we move on from our previous discussion in a number of ways. We reconsider the category of ‘amalala’, pushing back further against the categories of ethnicity that previously dominated socio-political analysis of pre-Shaka chi…
Reading across the Divides
This introduction draws attention to the value of a parallel reading of the separately authored articles which follow. It shows how a consideration of historical and archaeological research across the regional divide of south-east and north-west southern Africa unsettles a number of disciplinary orthodoxies, notably notions of distinct Nguni and Sotho identities. Complex political arrangements relating to differential access to economic resources…
Political Centralisation and the Making of Social Categories East of the Drakensberg in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries
This article examines the establishment of social categories in the increasingly centralised polities of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries east of the Drakensberg. It looks at the ways in which cultural and historical materials were used to shore up ideological claims and how they set limits on what could be claimed. Rulers manipulated and managed pre-existing ideas about origins, affiliations and cultural inheritances, as did th…
Thinking aloud/allowed
This article examines the controversy that erupted in 2006 when the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) was accused of banning certain commentators. The ‘blacklisting’ saga surfaced differences in ideas and practices of publicness among the contenders in the controversy and revealed that notions of the public, public accountability and the public interest were contested. The research describes independent newsroom practices conducted in…
Against the Museum as Chameleon
The Poetics and Politics of Public History
Luxury and the Waste of Life
The Trade Relations Between England and India (1600-1896)
The Swaziland Oral History Project
In 1985 an oral history project was established in Swaziland, based in the National Archives at Lobamba. The Oral History Project set itself three tasks; the establishment of an oral archive on Swazi history; the publication of a selection of transcripts form the oral archive concerning the precolonial history of Swaziland; the popularization of precolonial history. The precolonial history of Swaziland is the history of a largely non–literate peo…
An Appetite for the Past’
The Making of the AmaLala
Reaping the Whirlwind
The Poetics and Politics of Public History
The Character and Objects of Chaka’
An important aspect of Julian Cobbing's radical critique of the ‘mfecane’ as the pivotal concept of the history of southern Africa in the nineteenth century is the claim that the image of Shaka-as-monster was an ‘alibi’ invented by Europeans in the 1820s to mask their slaving activities. Reconsideration of this claim reveals that it is based on the misuse of evidence and inadequate periodisation of the earliest representations of Shaka. Examinati…
The Irish Flute Player's Handbook
Museums and Communities
Journal Article Museums and Communities: The Politics of Public Culture. Ed. by Ivan Karp, Christine Mullen Kreamer, and Steven D. Lavine. (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992. X, 614 pp. Cloth, $45.00, ISBN 1-56098-164-4. Paper, $16.95, ISBN 1-56098-189-X.) Get access Carolyn Hamilton Carolyn Hamilton University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar J…
Against the Museum as Chameleon
Zoolacraticism” and “Cannibalism”
(1995). “Zoolacraticism” and “Cannibalism”: A discussion of historical disposition towards the “Shakan” model of social order and political rights. Social Dynamics: Vol. 21, No. 2, pp. 1-22
The Future of the Past
(1996). The Future of the Past: New Trajectories. South African Historical Journal: Vol. 35, No. 1, pp. 146-148
Slavery in South Africa
Armed conflict
No Abstract
Restructuring within the Zulu royal house
1997). Restructuring within the Zulu royal house. African Studies: Vol. 56, No. 2, pp. 85-113
Terrific Majesty
Since his assassination in 1828, King Shaka Zulu—founder of the powerful Zulu kingdom and leader of the army that nearly toppled British colonial rule in South Africa—has made his empire in popular imaginations throughout Africa and the West. Shaka is today the hero of Zulu nationalism, the centerpiece of Inkatha ideology, a demon of apartheid, the namesake of a South African theme park, even the subject of a major TV film. Terrific Majesty explo…
The Mfecane Aftermath
Terrific Majesty
Revision; Reaction; RE-Vision; The role of museums in (a) transforming South Africa
Terrific Majesty
Collecting the classical world
Of the two values of ancient objects, the connoisseur's first concern is with the object today, and the archaeologist's is with its past place and the knowledge it offers about the past. Central to both is provenance, which comprises the 'archaeology' of the item - its story until it went to rest in the ground - and its 'history' - its story once found and brought to human awareness again. Our response to looting of antiquities depends on how ser…
‘Living by Fluidity’
Reaping the whirlwind
In 1988 Reader&s;s Digest pulled off what is probably the publishing coup of the decade in South Africa. Responding to the storm of popular opposition to traditional South African history that blew up in the 1980s, it produced a book that took up the challenge: The Illustrated History of South Africa: the real story . It sold over 85,000 copies within six months of publication and Reader&s;s Digest has battled to keep up &s;with the demand for th…
Arts for health
The potential health benefits of participation in the arts to the person and to the community have received widespread attention in recent years. The arts have been used as a medium for health promotion, as therapeutic interventions, and, in the case of the UK, health action zones and social inclusion partnerships’ arts projects have been specifically used to tackle social exclusion. As with other health care and social interventions, the arts ma…
History (29 works) · Political science (24 works) · South African History and Culture (22 works) · Law (19 works) · Politics (17 works) · Sociology (17 works) · History (16 works) · African history and culture studies (14 works) · Archaeology (13 works) · Art (13 works)