Paper short abstract:

What surfaces when a library is burnt, an archive lost? What emerges from the ashes and ruins? Our creative publication “Lost Libraries, Burnt Archive” addresses these questions and gathers perspectives from the arts and academia to contemplate loss, libraries, knowledge and the future of archives.

Paper long abstract:

What surfaces when a library is burnt, an archive lost? What emerges from the ashes and ruins? In this talk, we will present our recently published creative book “Lost Libraries, Burnt Archive” which brings together a plethora of perspectives from the fields of literature, fine arts, poetry and academic scholarship. The publication is a response to the tragic fire at the Jagger Library at the University of Cape Town in April 2021 and brought together a group of artists, poets, photographers, writers and scholars who collectively engaged with the significance of the event as well as broader questions pertaining to the loss of archives and the future of knowledge production practices for African Studies. In this presentation we share some of the key issues and problems raised by our 22 contributors. These include critical re-readings of what constitutes the ‘value’ of an archive, musings on archival loss and the significance of fire in the South African context, and elsewhere. This creative publication – combining diverse mediums, print and design formats and styles – and emerging from the ashes of many other books, is in itself a response to a lost archive and a contribution to a new one in the making.