Babel Unbound

Lesley Cowling is Associate Professor of Journalism at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg and an associate researcher at the Archive and Public Culture Research Initiative at the University of Cape Town. Carolyn Hamilton is the South African Research Chair in Archive and Public Culture at the University of Cape Town. She is the author of Terrific Majesty, and co-editor of Refiguring the Archive, The Cambridge History of South Africa and Babel Unbound.

This fi nger-on-the-pulse collection offers a new theory of the public sphere. Through news media, photography, archives, hashtags, ‘art-rage’, Muslim manuscripts, and much more, this incisive book illuminates the underlying dynamics of public engagement. — Isabel Hofmeyr, Global Distinguished Professor, New York University, Professor of African Literature, University of the Witwatersrand, and author of Gandhi’s Printing Press: Experiments in Slow Reading (2013); …an exciting book that brings the South African experience into the centre of debate over today’s deep crisis of public life and democracy. The interest is not just local. It is deeply relevant for understanding populism and protests around the world. — Craig Calhoun, University Professor of Social Sciences, Arizona State University (USA) and Centennial Professor, London School of Economics and Political Science (UK); This is a timely, original and sophisticated collection that thinks the idea of the public sphere from a southern location. The essays attempt, in creative ways, to move out of the impasse of quibbles over how ‘public’ the public sphere is, stressing its pluralities, capillary nature and dispersed sites of discussion. — Dilip Menon, Mellon Chair in Indian Studies and Director of the Centre for Indian Studies in Africa, University of Witwatersrand, and editor of Capitalisms: Towards a Global History (2020)

• Introduction - Lesley Cowling and Carolyn HamiltonChapter 1 Rethinking Public Engagement - Carolyn Hamilton and Lesley CowlingChapter 2 Tracing Public Engagements in Visual Forms - Carolyn Hamilton, Litheko Modisane and Rory BesterChapter 3 Media Orchestration in the Production of Public Debate - Lesley Cowling and Pascal MwaleChapter 4 Fluid Publics: The Public-Making Power of Hashtags in Digital Public Spaces - Indra De LanerolleChapter 5 'Now We See Him, Now We Don't': The Media and the 'Black Pimpernel' - Litheko ModisaneChapter 6 Archive and Public Life - Carolyn HamiltonChapter 7 Iconic Archive: Timbuktu and Its Manuscripts in Public Discourse - Susana Molins LliterasChapter 8 The Politics of Representation in Marikana: A Tale Of Competing Ideologies - Camalita NaickerChapter 9 Artrage and the Politics of Reconciliation - Nomusa MakhubuChapter 10 Anger, Pain, and the Body in the Public Sphere - Anthea GarmanContributorsIndex