Premesh Lalu
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 188150 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Premesh Lalu |
| PRENOMES | Premesh |
| SOBRENOME | Lalu |
| ASSINATURA | LALU P |
| AFILIAÇÕES | University of the Western Cape |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2006-7125 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 29 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 23 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 27 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 2 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 1996 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 3 |
Sensory Experiments, Sensory Orders, and Aesthetic Education
Erica Fretwell's Sensory Experiments: Psychophysics, Race, and the Aesthetics of Feeling (2020) raises crucial questions about the making of a concept of difference through marshaling the senses to the ends of a sensory order in postbellum United States. In this essay, I argue that Fretwell's book has opened a crucial horizon for rethinking how race and ideas of difference marking gender and disability were remade through the short-lived but deep…
Unseating Mastery
The conversation between Erich Hörl and Premesh Lalu draws on their extended conversation on efforts to link discordant temporal and spatial encounters with the idea of the university and how, more importantly, to care for the future of its educational responsibilities. While much of the debate on the university is focused on how it is affected by large-scale geopolitical shifts and the rapid expansion of technological resources, Hörl and Lalu br…
The university in techno-rational times
This concept note was produced for a symposium held under the banner of Critical University Studies – South Africa (CUS-SA) at the University of Johannesburg in August 2022. The opening plenary session was addressed by Profs. Premesh Lalu, Sarah Mosoetsa and Sarah Nuttall. A summary of a paper prepared for this symposium by Michael Peters on the university in techno-rational times was presented as part of the panel. The rest of the symposium feat…
Sadness, as such...
Love and Revolution in the Twentieth-Century Colonial and Postcolonial World
Love and Revolution in the Twentieth-Century Colonial and Postcolonial World
In the Event of History
Premesh Lalu's 'In the Event of History' was written in 2000, before the publication of his first book, The Deaths of Hintsa: Postapartheid South Africa and the Shape of Recurring Pasts in 2009, as a preparatory statement for his doctoral study on which it was based. 'In the Event of History' is published here for the first time, lightly revised. While the outlines of the argument of the Hintsa book are clear enough, it is addressed, as it is not…
What Is the University For
After apartheid, that is, after what some call racism's last word, how does the university institutionalized by the operation of apartheid reason imagine itself as being in and of the world? This is a question that lies at the heart of asking “What is the university for?” It is a question intensified in relation to thinking from the institutional space of a historically Black university. Apartheid's university is the last stand of what the articl…
Thinking Across Hemispheres
In the midst of ever-hardening nationalist sentiment across the world, the humanities may need to recall its long history of thinking across hemispheres. In such balkanised times, we may have to rethink the work that a hermeneutics of suspicion performs for a critical humanities as well as how Africa is bound to particular configurations of area studies that emerge out of the geopolitical distributions of knowledge during the Cold War. To the ext…
Thinking Across Hemispheres
In the midst of ever-hardening nationalist sentiment across the world, the humanities may need to recall its long history of thinking across hemispheres. In such balkanised times, we may have to rethink the work that a hermeneutics of suspicion performs for a critical humanities as well as how Africa is bound to particular configurations of area studies that emerge out of the geopolitical distributions of knowledge during the Cold War. To the ext…
Remains of the Social
x progress in his 'Theses on the Philosophy of History'. Indeed, what is explored here, in various ways, is the notion that the very question of loss, as Zita Nunes has argued, might be read not only as constitutive of, or constituted by, the social -the social produced through loss, the grave as its first commemorative sign, or the social apportioning life and death and designating its grievability -but rather as a masking of that which enables …
Remains of the Social
Traversing the Social
Between history and apocalypse
Apartheid rested on a division of the senses as much as it did on a reductive politics of racial subjection and its accompanying violence. As an instance of the division of the senses, it produced a condition of stasis in which history and a post-apartheid future were increasingly marked by a politico-religious discourse of apocalypse, and a moral claim formed around family melodrama. In seeking to escape this nightmare, I ask whether we may disc…
Unlearning History
Siba Grovogui's Beyond Eurocentrism and Anarchy is a text that recuperates a modality of critical thought about an emergent object of modern governmentality generally ignored by the discipline and discourse of international relations. International relations, according to Grovogui, has downplayed some of the most critical and innovative moral and political thinking of the anticolonial world in the twentieth century, to its detriment. In its asymm…
Breaking the Mold of Disciplinary Area Studies
At the outset of an edited volume on Intellectuals and African Development, the question is posed about what went wrong.1 The call for self-reflection perhaps anticipates a further question—about how to account for the effects of area studies on scholarship in Africa in the era of independence and development. Much of this reflection has of course been occasioned by the work of scholars initially educated in African universities but later located…
Empire and Nation
In this article, I suggest that the idea of the South African empire may need further conceptual elaboration if it is to support and sustain the project of keeping alive a desire for a post-apartheid future as a possible horizon in Southern African historiography. A notion of the South African empire bound to the desire for a post-apartheid future will depend on our ability to distinguish between ideological racism and biopolitics. The biopolitic…
Still searching for 'the human
Where Does Sadness Come From? Politics, Potentiality and a Possible Humanities
If, as Spinoza suggests, sadness is an inadequate idea, how do we account for its mobilization in nationalist and post-colonial critiques of colonialism, neo-colonialism and neo-liberalism? How, in other words, might we see in the inadequate idea of sadness the very conditions for thinking our way into a discussion of political subjectivity that loosens the grip of biopolitics on African subjectivity? Drawing on aesthetic practices of art and fil…
Thinking Ahead
This article takes up the generous invitation by the editors of the South African Historical Journal to restate the major theoretical and historical interventions of The Deaths of Hintsa: Post-apartheid South Africa and the Shape of Recurring Pasts (2009) in light of a recent reading of the text proposed by Brian Rutledge. I suggest that the story of the killing of Hintsa is haunted by an ontological matrix of life and death as the condition of w…
The virtual stampede for Africa
This article presents a polemical argument for a politics of digitisation that aims to politicise the archival disciplines while making sense of the conjuncture in which digitisation initiatives are mooted in Southern Africa. It argues for a blurring of the work of archivist and historian in reconstituting the archive of the liberation struggle. It alters the paradigmatic frameworks of the Cold War that have hitherto defined the structure of the …
The Border and the Body
Digitization, History, and the Making of a Postcolonial Archive of Southern African Liberation Struggles
Allen Isaacman, Premesh Lalu, Thomas Nygren, Digitization, History, and the Making of a Postcolonial Archive of Southern African Liberation Struggles: The Aluka Project, Africa Today, Vol. 52, No. 2, African Electronic Publishing (Winter, 2005), pp. 55-77
Incomplete histories
This paper gathers together deliberations surrounding Steve Biko's I Write What I Like as it simultaneously registers the critical importance of the text as an incomplete history. Rather than presupposing the text as a form of biography or following a trend of translating Biko into a prophet of reconciliation, I argue that the text leads us towards the postcolonial problematic of self‐writing. That problematic, I argue, names the encounter betwee…
The Grammar of Domination and the Subjection of Agency
This article focuses on colonial accounts of the killing of the Xhosa chief, Hintsa, in 1835 at the hands of British forces along what came to be known as the eastern Cape frontier. It explores the evidentiary procedures and protocols through which the event came to be narrated in colonial frames of intelligibility. In proposing a strategy for reading the colonial archive, the paper strategically interrupts the flow from an apartheid historiograp…
Digitization, History, and the Making of a Postcolonial Archive of Southern African Liberation Struggles
Allen Isaacman, Premesh Lalu, Thomas Nygren, Digitization, History, and the Making of a Postcolonial Archive of Southern African Liberation Struggles: The Aluka Project, Africa Today, Vol. 52, No. 2, African Electronic Publishing (Winter, 2005), pp. 55-77
The Grammar of Domination and the Subjection of Agency
This article focuses on colonial accounts of the killing of the Xhosa chief, Hintsa, in 1835 at the hands of British forces along what came to be known as the eastern Cape frontier. It explores the evidentiary procedures and protocols through which the event came to be narrated in colonial frames of intelligibility. In proposing a strategy for reading the colonial archive, the paper strategically interrupts the flow from an apartheid historiograp…
Still searching for 'the human
The university in techno-rational times
This concept note was produced for a symposium held under the banner of Critical University Studies – South Africa (CUS-SA) at the University of Johannesburg in August 2022. The opening plenary session was addressed by Profs. Premesh Lalu, Sarah Mosoetsa and Sarah Nuttall. A summary of a paper prepared for this symposium by Michael Peters on the university in techno-rational times was presented as part of the panel. The rest of the symposium feat…
Empire and Nation
In this article, I suggest that the idea of the South African empire may need further conceptual elaboration if it is to support and sustain the project of keeping alive a desire for a post-apartheid future as a possible horizon in Southern African historiography. A notion of the South African empire bound to the desire for a post-apartheid future will depend on our ability to distinguish between ideological racism and biopolitics. The biopolitic…
Medical Anthropology, Subaltern Traces, and the Making and Meaning of Western Medicine in South Africa
All things in nature are interesting to study, and especially humanity. The different phases in the different classes of life cannot fail to be interesting, and a medical man can gain a far greater insight through such study into the domestic life of his fellow creatures than anyone else. The word “progress” has its true meaning and significance in the higher walks of medicine. It does not mean a mere improvement in the principles and art of heal…
Unseating Mastery
The conversation between Erich Hörl and Premesh Lalu draws on their extended conversation on efforts to link discordant temporal and spatial encounters with the idea of the university and how, more importantly, to care for the future of its educational responsibilities. While much of the debate on the university is focused on how it is affected by large-scale geopolitical shifts and the rapid expansion of technological resources, Hörl and Lalu br…
Staging Historical Argument
This article focuses on the lecture-room debates which have been the central feature of the first-year history course at the University of the Western Cape (UWC) since 1993. The UWC History Department takes the position that in first-year teaching the main aim should be to show students that the discipline is always contested and to introduce them to historical argument. The article makes a case for these lecture-room debates as a developmental s…
Journeys from the horizons of history
This article draws \ninspiration from Jauss's theorisation of the concepts of horizon, reception, and \nconstruction. The problem we confront relates to the way we receive, interpret, \nand apply texts without cognisance of the ways our horizons advance, limit, and \nintersect with a multiplicity of meanings that might not have been foreseen by \nthe text's contemporaries. What are the distances between public encounters \nwith the past on the on…
Staging Historical Argument
This article focuses on the lecture-room debates which have been the central feature of the first-year history course at the University of the Western Cape (UWC) since 1993. The UWC History Department takes the position that in first-year teaching the main aim should be to show students that the discipline is always contested and to introduce them to historical argument. The article makes a case for these lecture-room debates as a developmental s…
Heart and stone
Medical Anthropology, Subaltern Traces, and the Making and Meaning of Western Medicine in South Africa
All things in nature are interesting to study, and especially humanity. The different phases in the different classes of life cannot fail to be interesting, and a medical man can gain a far greater insight through such study into the domestic life of his fellow creatures than anyone else. The word “progress” has its true meaning and significance in the higher walks of medicine. It does not mean a mere improvement in the principles and art of heal…
The Grammar of Domination and the Subjection of Agency
This article focuses on colonial accounts of the killing of the Xhosa chief, Hintsa, in 1835 at the hands of British forces along what came to be known as the eastern Cape frontier. It explores the evidentiary procedures and protocols through which the event came to be narrated in colonial frames of intelligibility. In proposing a strategy for reading the colonial archive, the paper strategically interrupts the flow from an apartheid historiograp…
Incomplete histories
This paper gathers together deliberations surrounding Steve Biko's I Write What I Like as it simultaneously registers the critical importance of the text as an incomplete history. Rather than presupposing the text as a form of biography or following a trend of translating Biko into a prophet of reconciliation, I argue that the text leads us towards the postcolonial problematic of self‐writing. That problematic, I argue, names the encounter betwee…
Digitization, History, and the Making of a Postcolonial Archive of Southern African Liberation Struggles
Allen Isaacman, Premesh Lalu, Thomas Nygren, Digitization, History, and the Making of a Postcolonial Archive of Southern African Liberation Struggles: The Aluka Project, Africa Today, Vol. 52, No. 2, African Electronic Publishing (Winter, 2005), pp. 55-77
The virtual stampede for Africa
This article presents a polemical argument for a politics of digitisation that aims to politicise the archival disciplines while making sense of the conjuncture in which digitisation initiatives are mooted in Southern Africa. It argues for a blurring of the work of archivist and historian in reconstituting the archive of the liberation struggle. It alters the paradigmatic frameworks of the Cold War that have hitherto defined the structure of the …
The Border and the Body
Thinking Ahead
This article takes up the generous invitation by the editors of the South African Historical Journal to restate the major theoretical and historical interventions of The Deaths of Hintsa: Post-apartheid South Africa and the Shape of Recurring Pasts (2009) in light of a recent reading of the text proposed by Brian Rutledge. I suggest that the story of the killing of Hintsa is haunted by an ontological matrix of life and death as the condition of w…
Still searching for 'the human
Where Does Sadness Come From? Politics, Potentiality and a Possible Humanities
If, as Spinoza suggests, sadness is an inadequate idea, how do we account for its mobilization in nationalist and post-colonial critiques of colonialism, neo-colonialism and neo-liberalism? How, in other words, might we see in the inadequate idea of sadness the very conditions for thinking our way into a discussion of political subjectivity that loosens the grip of biopolitics on African subjectivity? Drawing on aesthetic practices of art and fil…
Empire and Nation
In this article, I suggest that the idea of the South African empire may need further conceptual elaboration if it is to support and sustain the project of keeping alive a desire for a post-apartheid future as a possible horizon in Southern African historiography. A notion of the South African empire bound to the desire for a post-apartheid future will depend on our ability to distinguish between ideological racism and biopolitics. The biopolitic…
Between history and apocalypse
Apartheid rested on a division of the senses as much as it did on a reductive politics of racial subjection and its accompanying violence. As an instance of the division of the senses, it produced a condition of stasis in which history and a post-apartheid future were increasingly marked by a politico-religious discourse of apocalypse, and a moral claim formed around family melodrama. In seeking to escape this nightmare, I ask whether we may disc…
Unlearning History
Siba Grovogui's Beyond Eurocentrism and Anarchy is a text that recuperates a modality of critical thought about an emergent object of modern governmentality generally ignored by the discipline and discourse of international relations. International relations, according to Grovogui, has downplayed some of the most critical and innovative moral and political thinking of the anticolonial world in the twentieth century, to its detriment. In its asymm…
Breaking the Mold of Disciplinary Area Studies
At the outset of an edited volume on Intellectuals and African Development, the question is posed about what went wrong.1 The call for self-reflection perhaps anticipates a further question—about how to account for the effects of area studies on scholarship in Africa in the era of independence and development. Much of this reflection has of course been occasioned by the work of scholars initially educated in African universities but later located…
Remains of the Social
x progress in his 'Theses on the Philosophy of History'. Indeed, what is explored here, in various ways, is the notion that the very question of loss, as Zita Nunes has argued, might be read not only as constitutive of, or constituted by, the social -the social produced through loss, the grave as its first commemorative sign, or the social apportioning life and death and designating its grievability -but rather as a masking of that which enables …
Remains of the Social
Traversing the Social
Thinking Across Hemispheres
In the midst of ever-hardening nationalist sentiment across the world, the humanities may need to recall its long history of thinking across hemispheres. In such balkanised times, we may have to rethink the work that a hermeneutics of suspicion performs for a critical humanities as well as how Africa is bound to particular configurations of area studies that emerge out of the geopolitical distributions of knowledge during the Cold War. To the ext…
What Is the University For
After apartheid, that is, after what some call racism's last word, how does the university institutionalized by the operation of apartheid reason imagine itself as being in and of the world? This is a question that lies at the heart of asking “What is the university for?” It is a question intensified in relation to thinking from the institutional space of a historically Black university. Apartheid's university is the last stand of what the articl…
Thinking Across Hemispheres
In the midst of ever-hardening nationalist sentiment across the world, the humanities may need to recall its long history of thinking across hemispheres. In such balkanised times, we may have to rethink the work that a hermeneutics of suspicion performs for a critical humanities as well as how Africa is bound to particular configurations of area studies that emerge out of the geopolitical distributions of knowledge during the Cold War. To the ext…
Sadness, as such...
Love and Revolution in the Twentieth-Century Colonial and Postcolonial World
Love and Revolution in the Twentieth-Century Colonial and Postcolonial World
Sociology (21 obras) · Political science (20 obras) · History (15 obras) · Law (15 obras) · Philosophy (12 obras) · South African History and Culture (12 obras) · Epistemology (11 obras) · Politics (11 obras) · Art (9 obras) · Aesthetics (8 obras)