CETRA is pleased to welcome Professor Ilse Feinauer (University of Stellenbosch) in Antwerp to deliver the CETRA Fall Lecture 2023. Her lecture will take place on Wednesday, 15 November 2023 from 10:30am to 12:30pm in Auditorium ‘Het Ei‘ on the Carolus Campus (Hendrik Conscienceplein 8, 2000 Antwerp). A livestream (via Teams) will also be provided for those who prefer to attend remotely. To register, send an email by 13 November to jack.mcmartin@kuleuven.be.
Curatorial practice as translation: The case of the District Six Museum in Cape Town
Abstract
The words District Six are synonymous with some of the most horrible signs of the apartheid system for the vast majority of people in South Africa. District Six was established in 1867, one of six districts in Cape Town. District Six was a vibrant centre with close links to the city and the port. People of all colours, races, religions – residents, immigrants, artisans and merchants – owned and rented houses. They lived in harmony and were close to their places of work, school, worship and entertainment. The equalizer between them was poverty. In 1901 all the black people were forced to move out, and as the decades passed by it became a predominantly coloured community, until 1966 when the apartheid government declared it a white area under the Group Areas Act. By 1982 District Six was a barren strip of land, and so it stayed for many years. In 1994, two years after apartheid was abolished, the museum was established in the former residential area in an old church.
In this talk, I want to discuss whether the curatorial processes applied in this museum indeed translate into people’s memory of the sad part of their history. Does the selection and display of personal memoirs and mementos tell of both a happier time before the bulldozers moved in and how the brutality of the apartheid state destroyed the community? I then discuss whether interlinguistic and intralinguistic translation were utilised to portray the multi-lingual and multi-cultural aspects of the former residents of this neighbourhood who are represented in the District Six Museum.
About the speaker
Ilse Feinauer is Professor at the University of Stellenbosch where she keeps a research chair in Afrikaans language practice. She has just been appointed as President of the South African Academy of Science and Arts. She teaches translation studies and Afrikaans linguistics. Her research focus is on socio-cognitive translation studies. She has taught at KU Leuven and the University of Ghent in Belgium, Humboldt University in Berlin, Melbourne University in Australia, University of Bologna (Forli) and the University of Trieste in Italy. Her most recent book-publication, with co-editors Amanda Marais and Marius Swart, is Translation Flows: Exploring Networks of People, Processes and Products (John Benjamins, 2023). She is a founding member of the Association for Translation Studies in Africa (ATSA). She is the first African member of the Executive Board of the European Society for Translation Studies (EST) and has succeeded in bringing the 9th EST Congress to Africa in 2019, the first time that the EST has moved beyond Europe’s boundaries.
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