The inscription of a strange-looking industrial site- coalmine on Hashima- on the World Heritage Site has proved to be the most publicly contested debate of heritage making work between Japan and Korea The debate about this place brings up poignant questions with regard to not only the significance of this heritage, but also the subsequent use of this island. The failure of reconciliation between countries especially, but also of reparation, restitution since the end of the Second World War and the issues of identity and memory have been brought to the fore. This paper seeks to challenge the dominant modes of heritage making and, in so doing, offer an analysis of influences from political, social and economic factors or an improved understanding of the dynamics of capitalistic production expansion. The origin and transformation of tradition is invoked in attempts to explain the pervasiveness and power of historical temporality and continuity. A critical approach to canonisation is employed whereby the choice of heritage resources is done in a more limited and cogent manner. It is argued that currently heritage-making functions as both value distribution and intentional perception for a people in a nation. Above all, the social life of those living in industrial ruins is positioned in the new perspective that as heritage resources they cannot be separated from capitalistic production and world history. Following from this, it is said that the temporality and spatiality of ruins need a political, social and economic debate in which the myths of the nation are forged, transmitted, negotiated and reconstructed constantly. Through employing these ideas, one can relate the thematic approach of heritage selection to commodification, collective memory, capitalism and nationalism in a theoretical and analytical way.

This mini-dissertation is a study of the phenomenon of life-casting and the display of these in the museum space. It looks specifically at the practice as it came into use at the turn of the twentieth century at the South African Museum in the Western Cape. The research aims to place the practice in context with the historical triggers and larger perspectives of the subject of indigenous races. A focus on particular life-casts and its display in designed productions allows the reader insight into knowledge production. I point to this to unpack a loaded history informing deeply seated identity constructs and prejudices. A trajectory of the use of the life-casts is supported by visual records included in this text. The museum's archive also affords a plethora of correspondence and research giving context and insight. A close analysis of the archive exposes the museum's processes and the exchange in consumption and production by museum visitors and related institutions both private and state supported. The making and unmaking of the life-casts acts as proxy for peoples brutally subjugated.

Includes bibliographical references. / This dissertation is an interdisciplinary study of the Rex Trueform garment manufacturing factory in Salt River, Cape Town. It follows the narrative of the site from the date of completion of the first factory in 1938 up until conversion of the site into an office park in 2013. Architecturally, the buildings are key works by pioneer modernist architects, Policansky, Andrews and Niegeman . The analysis of the form and the space of the buildings is interlocked with an analysis of the conditions with in which these distinct buildings were conceived and built. As 20th century industrial buildings in Cape Town, they are representative of a particular kind of modernity, one that is entangled with constructions of race, class and gender. The dissertation looks at how particular notions of race, class and gender were constructed, materialised and inscribed in the architectural form and space. The buildings are a primary archival source, but conversational interviews with ex-workers begin to give a glimpse of what it was like to work for Rex Trueform, considered as a significant company in the clothing manufacturing industry. Visual material, drawings and film footage, tracks the architectural development of the site, linking it with key moments in the political life of South Africa. This raises questions around the relations hip between the apartheid state - endorsed white capital and disenfranchised black labour. Race and identity is a key theme, questioning the role that industry, sociology and apartheid played in the constructions and stabilising thereof with the Cape factory as a primary site. The buildings, situated both in the historical time as well as in the contemporary postapartheid framework, offer multiple readings of how space and architecture contributed towards ascribing identities onto people and how these ascribed identities were and are being contested and disrupted. The dissertation thus raises questions of how the modern city of Cape Town was produced by looking at some of the socio-political conditions under which Rex Trueform, a major industrial site, was developed.

Digitisation is occurring all over the world today. So to bring it to South Africa is one step in changing people’s understandings of Africa, because the information would be accessible to the world and the rest of South Africa. There are many challenges that have been debated around digitisation in Africa such as technological challenges, international relations or external institutions, the creation of a new kind of archive and the various digitising projects that have occurred in Africa specifically for creating online libraries. This study’s focal point is on two collections that are housed at the University of the Western Cape Archive; The Sarah Baartman and Khoi San Collections. The documents with regards to Sarah Baartman are the books of her story and how she became famous, but there is more to the books that we see in the shops or hear of. The collection of documents hold valuable information about her return to her homeland and the research of her descent. The Sarah Baartman Collection consists of the documentation that helped with the return of her remains. The University of the Western Cape Khoi San Collection consists of documentation of the Khoi San Conference that was held in 1994, with regards to the notion of becoming an identity and to view the Khoi San as people and not as just objects of study. The documents are basically faxes and letters that were sent to a Professor Bredekamp at the University of the Western Cape who was a participant in the conference. The University of the Western Cape Khoi San Collection is different from the Bleek and Lloyd Collections in that it is not someone’s journal or research but peoples voices of protecting the Khoi San Heritage. The two collections were chosen due to the fact that there was a gap in how to digitise collections that belonged to indigenous people/ descendent communities within South Africa and how to access these collections. The key purpose of the study is to determine the implications that digitisation has on Public Access. The aims of the study were to investigate the factors that determined decisions about how to digitise an Archive and how does Access impact digitisation. The data for this study was collected by the help of Archivists. The subjects of this study were archivists with the respected expert knowledge in digitisation. A semi-structured questionnaire was emailed to six Archivists. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with the same six Archivists; the interviews were recorded on audiotape or hand written. On the basis of the results of this research it can be concluded that archives need to develop policies that incorporate consultations and take into consideration the descendent communities before the digitisation process occurs. There need to be cultural sensitivity towards collections of indigenous people which rarely occurs during digitisation. The recommendations that flowed from this study are: there needs to be further research in the curation of digital archives, needs to be more communication between archives and communities and digitisation policies need to be standardized.

This thesis is concerned with the ways in which museums have been used as vehicles to convey notions of the nation. It looks specifically at the Iziko Museums of South Africa's social history sites that deal with the subject of slavery. It is concerned with the absence of a narrative of slavery at Iziko museums before the demise of Apartheid and looks the historical and socio-political changes that lead to its emergence in South African historical consciousness. It is a study of the history of museums as well as the ways in which history has been used in museums. It looks at the ways Iziko, as a national museum, has guarded and promoted ideas of the nation as decided by the state. The thesis examines with the ways in which the museum has transformed since its inception in the colonial period up to the present day. The time period investigated is 1855 to 2016. Guiding questions for the thesis are: for what purpose were museums created in South Africa; what are the implications of colonial practice on the ways in which they functioned; why has the history of slavery has been disavowed in South African historical consciousness; what led to the rise of the study of slavery in South Africa; what has the emergence of the new museology meant for museum practice; how have heritage studies transformed the South African historical landscape. The thesis begins with a theoretical literature overview of museums more generally and its links with power and representation and the colonial regime. It then moves on to investigate the origin and history of Iziko museums by working through published literature on the subject, unpublished materials, other institutional materials found in the Iziko archive and interviews conducted with past and current employees. It then looks takes an historical survey of South African historiography and its exclusion of the history of slavery and later the emergence of such a narrative. Lastly it looks at how the nation has been narrated by the state after Apartheid and how the museum responded to the new dispensation. The thesis concludes that Iziko museums have transformed over the last two centuries in terms of the subject matter it studies. Museological activity has been diversified to include a range of subjects hitherto ignored in South African public consciousness due to the legacy of both colonialism and Apartheid. Most importantly it shows that the museum has continually responded to concepts of the South African nation and that national museums are inextricably tied to the nation-state.