Theo Di Castri

The idea of giving anybody a voice sits uneasily with me. I prefer to think about practices of listening and lines of inquiry that can open up the history of science to a wider range of voices. To this end, I’ll limit my remarks to considering some potential directions of travel that might bring us closer to such an ideal.

In his article ‘Sciences and the global’, Sujit Sivasundaram cautions us against taking an overly dichotomous view of knowledge, in which ‘colonial knowledge’ is identifiable and separable from ‘colonized knowledge’.Footnote ¹ In a similar sense, I think we should avoid setting up an overly dichotomous picture of ‘those who can speak’ and ‘those who are silenced’. Reflecting on how silence factors into my present research on the recent history of the social science of drug prevention in the Americas, I find myself distinguishing between instances when certain historical actors, for example:

• - have been intentionally silenced;

• - have intentionally remained silent;

• - have inadvertently failed to create formal archival traces for themselves due to a lack of funding, institutional infrastructure, and/or having different priorities but who are otherwise still traceable and willing to give oral history interviews;

• - appear as ‘silent’ only from the standpoint of certain geographical-linguistic positions (e.g. from the vantage point of English-language historiography, but not necessarily from the vantage point of Latin American, Spanish-language historiography).

I view cross-contextualization as one method within an expanding methodological repertoire that is helping me navigate this differentiated field of silences.Footnote ² I am also finding it helpful to revisit and remain engaged with theoretical scholarship that draws out the kinds of silences that are at play within our histories.Footnote ³ In my own research, for example, William Booth’s recent work on the Latin American Cold War has shed valuable light on the multiple layers of violences and silences that operate within the contexts I am studying.Footnote ⁴ Engaging the theoretical work on variegation that has come out of geography over the past couple of decades has also proved fruitful in developing a more nuanced understanding of how spatially differentiated forms of silence are produced and sustained.Footnote ⁵ Taken together, such theoretical scholarship is shaping not only my selection and analysis of sources, but also my reflections on the positionality of my own historical voice within these layered landscapes of silence. All this to say, ‘cross-contextualization’ might be best understood as one tool within a broader constellation of methodological and theoretical approaches for confronting the multiple forms of silence we encounter as global historians of science.

In his article, Sivasundaram also calls on us to radically extend the categories of practices we consider when identifying sources for global histories of science. He invites us to look beyond traditional textual sources and to treat singing, performance, monument-building, and navigational practices as equally valid sources. In a similar spirit, I propose a radical extension of our own historical practices if we are serious about recovering, repairing, or even adding new threads to that larger and richer tapestry that Sivasundaram invites us to read. That is, in addition to thinking about how we can identify and read sources in creative and cross-contextualized ways, we might also commit ourselves to, for example:

• - building relationships of trust and reciprocity with those we write with or about (or, at least with their descendants);

• - participating in, learning from, and finding ways to make our histories useful to the social movements of those who are already fighting for their voices to be heard;

• - finding creative ways to divert the funds and cultural capital that we have access to as academics to make more room for those on whose behalf we might otherwise be speaking about or for;

• - working with activists, artists, and members of marginalized communities to learn from and redress the silences of the past by building new kinds of archives in the here and now;

• - joining our unions and advocating for the institutional and material conditions that need to be in place for any/all of the above to take place in more ethical, sustainable ways.

In addition to working ‘cross-contextually’ at the level of our sources, these other practices will bring us closer to creating more truly polyvocal global histories of science. Tellingly though, none of these practices were ever taught to me as part of my formal education as a historian. And although I consider them an integral part of my own historical practice, I find it all too easy to begin thinking of them as ‘extracurricular’ or ‘side projects’ in the face of the institutional and market pressures of present-day academia.

As a step towards countering this situation, perhaps we could listen to feminist calls for ‘slow science’, or to the growing chorus of archivists, scholars, and artists who are creating ‘slow archives’.Footnote ⁶ If we were to slow down the global history of science, could we create enough time not only to learn these other practices, but to actually practise and hone them? Perhaps we shouldn’t be in too much of a rush to move ‘beyond the global history of science’ just yet. Perhaps we’re only still arriving.

Finally, we might also pay more attention to those who are working in/on regions and topics where archival silences are not just distant historical puzzles to be solved, but rather present-day matters of life and death. On this front, there are important lessons to be learned from the artists, activists, and scholars who are developing an arsenal of critical, creative, and often collective practices to confront the silencing forces that continue to shape the present. And here I’ll pass it over to Rabia who will share an example of what such work can look like in practice.

Rabia Abba Omar

To guide my essay, I’m going to use two iterations of the Elegy performances by Gabrielle Goliath to respond to the prompt of ‘giving intentionally silenced people(s) an archival voice’. Elegy is a body of performances which Goliath began staging from 2015 to the present and are described as ‘an ongoing labor of remembrance, repair and black feminist love’.Footnote ⁷ Using Goliath’s Elegy, I am looking at how cross-contextualization as a method brings together the more ‘plentiful and traditional’ sources of the archive with the mode of performance, and more generally artworks, that build from and question the history produced by these sources. And then, how this contributes towards the work of producing new knowledge that values the relationship between different materials, makers, and places.

Gabrielle Goliath is a South African artist whose work interrogates the reverberations of colonial and apartheid violence, specifically gendered, racialized, and sexualized violences from the past to the present within the continuing crisis of gender-based violence in South Africa. In more recent years, her work has turned to look at gender-based violence across the globe. Elegy, like much of Goliath’s other work, is an act of ongoing mourning. In this work, each performance is a ritual of lament of remembering, an hour-long durational performance staged to commemorate the life of a woman or a queer person whose life was taken in an act of violence.

In each iteration of Elegy, several female operatic vocal performers dressed in all black, in a darkened room with only a spotlight shining on the platform they stand on, take turns to sing a B-natural note. The note is chosen for its ability to be sustained for a long time, and without mechanical amplification, and one by one, the performers step up and hold the note for as long as their breath can sustain. As they descend, another performer begins to step up behind them, continuing the long, mourning lament.

Throughout the live performance, you are never made to feel comfortable – sometimes there are few seats, and you are left to either sit or stand in the darkness but sit and stand collectively. For both the live performances and the recorded ones, you are encouraged to slow down for the hour, to stay and to be uncomfortable in the process of recalling and honouring the past, and those lost, collectively. During a performance of Elegy, we witness the singers tire as they perform the taxing work of singing for the hour, and as it takes its toll on them, we watch as they carry the pain of the stories that they are trying to evoke/invoke.

Accompanying each iteration of the work is a tribute written by a loved one which is meant to bring to life the memory of the person commemorated by the mourning ritual that is unfolding before and around the audience.

The first Elegy I want to look at is the Elegy – Louisa van de Caab (2018), first performed with the opening night of the ‘Undercover of Darkness: Tracing Stories of Women in Servitude under Colonialism’ (2018) exhibition curated by Dr Carine Zaayman. It opened at the Iziko Museum’s Slave Lodge in Cape Town, South Africa, and unlike most other Elegy performances, this work was accompanied by a text written by the historian Dr Saarah Jappie, rather than a friend or a family member.Footnote ⁸

Louisa van de Caab was murdered by her romantic partner Ceres van Madagascar, both enslaved under Oltham Ahlers, on a farm near Tygerberg, South Africa.Footnote ⁹ Accused by another of Ahlers’s slaves of being unfaithful to Ceres, Louisa was murdered by Ceres in February 1768. One evening as she was preparing tea for Ahlers’s children, Ceres entered the kitchen, greeted Louisa with a smile and took her by the hand outside. Ceres confronted Louisa, hitting and stabbing her and then fleeing the scene. He was found a few days later, put on trial and executed.

In the commemorative text, Jappie asks questions of the archival record yet she writes that ‘the Official Record spat back only facts. Dates, names, times. The trajectory of the knife as it cut through you and took your life – a life of which we will only ever know one brutal, last moment.’

Within the archive of this event and Louisa’s life, our only record of Louisa is that of her death – the moment she was silenced. So, my question then is: how can artists engage with the silence within the archive, perhaps not giving a voice but to create a space to remember? And how does this voice, or this sound created, reverberate across centuries and countries, connecting experiences of gendered, racialized, and sexualized violences?

In this body of work, mourning becomes an act of a political and social work, it becomes a way to recuperate a voice that has been intentionally silenced. As we question who has a voice in the archive, and how we give those a voice to those who have been silenced, we should also question who is remembered and how we re-member them.

The second Elegy I want to look at today is Elegy: for two ancestors (2024), performed at the 2024 Venice Biennale. As with Elegy: Louisa van de Caab, Gabrielle Goliath invited a scholar to contribute the commemorative text. This time, Zoé Samudzi was invited to write a speculative reflection which invokes the silences and absences, through their presence in the archive, of two Nama women who were displaced and killed in the Ovaherrero and Nama genocide in Namibia.Footnote ¹⁰

The two unnamed women within the photographic collection of Dresden’s Museum für Völkerkunde are commemorated by this iteration of Elegy. In the first text, we are introduced to the photographs. These are accompanied by labels that reduce the women to racial and ethnic identifiers, becoming, as Samudzi writes, ‘the absent identities comprise of an archive in themselves, part of a near endless repository of gendered violation’. As Jappie challenges the archival record by asking it questions, Samudzi refuses to let their namelessness and the captured moment be what silences them. Instead, she searches for the tiny details and by doing so, the photographs are the way that the two women assert their liveliness and thus their personhood. They existed – they were here beyond what the photograph and its label project.

In the second text, Samudzi presents our sacred tasks, our responsibility towards our ancestors, to our dead, even those whose names we cannot easily recall. This task of mourning becomes our refusal to let them disappear further into the void of violent history and intentional silence.

What draws me to Gabrielle Goliath’s Elegy is that it requires us to move outside of the document. In both iterations, we move outside of an archival record. In the case of Louisa van de Caab, we move outside of the courtroom with its own system and structure imposed as a logic of sense-making by and for those who enslaved her. Similarly, for the two unnamed women, we move outside of the photograph and the moments of capture – photographically, physically, and within the archive. The collective labour and the affective witnessing of Elegy connect us in a space to reckon with the past and present, to mourn, and gives us a sound for (our) loss.

In thinking about cross-contextualization, as we read beyond a location, a genre, a discipline, and a period of time, works like Elegy create a new archive, one where we perform the sacred task of honouring the dead, re-membering and mourning those whom we cannot name but know existed, across the many borders that can separate us. Here, we name the absences and create a sound for the loss. Additionally, Elegy becomes what Laura Mitchell describes as an ‘archival patchwork’,Footnote ¹¹ where pieces of evidence are brought together from different collections across the world and from different periods and stitched together. Goliath, with the written pieces by Jappie and Samudzi, reconstruct and stitch together the lives of the three women in colonial South Africa and colonial Namibia, drawing attention to the mechanics of the archival document and its silences and challenging us to consider beyond it. Thus, they offer us both a visibility and a sonic reckoning with our past.

These silences exist purposefully, and we can never bestow or give a voice to those who have been silenced but we can let the lamenting cry reverberate between us and the past, reminding us to honour those who were denied life.