Vivian Bickford-Smith, MA, DPhil (Cantab)

Visiting Professor of Comparative Metropolitan History

Contents

Vivian’s current research project is a comparative history of Cape Town, Johannesburg and Durban in the post-Second World War period. The focus is on how distinct senses of place were promoted and experienced in each of them. This includes exploring how and in what ways these three ‘cities of the South’ claimed to be metropolitan. Most of Vivian’s previous work has been on South African urban history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and especially on the history of Cape Town. A particular aim of much of this work was to investigate the construction, maintenance, interaction and historical salience of social group identities along the lines of class, race and ethnicity.

Additional research interests have been African ‘film and history’, including most recently the question of how South African cities have been represented in film, as well as the history of Britishness (South Africa’s ‘forgotten nationalism’). Both these interests are pertinent to the current research project. Vivian’s postgraduate supervisions have been in the fields of South African urban history and film and history. He is a Professor in the Historical Studies Department at the University of Cape Town and on the editorial advisory committee of Urban History.

Publications (Books)

  • Black and White in Colour: African History on Screen (Cape Town, Oxford, and Athens:  Double Storey, James Currey and Ohio University Press, 2007) – co-edited with R. Mendelsohn (eds. and contributing authors)
  • Cape Town in the Twentieth Century, (Cape Town: David Philip, 1999) – co-authored with Nigel Worden and Elizabeth Van Heyningen
  • Cape Town: The Making of a City, (Cape Town: David Philip, 1998) – co-authored with Nigel Worden and Elizabeth Van Heyningen
  • Ethnic Pride and Racial Prejudice in Victorian Cape Town, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995)
  • The Waterfront, (Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 1994) – co-authored with Msokoli Qotole, Elizabeth Van Heyningen and Nigel Worden.

Publications (Articles)

  • ‘Ethnicity, Place and Protest: Perspectives on Radical Cultures and Local Identities in South African Cities’ in K.Cowman and I.Packer (eds.), Radical Cultures and Local Identities in an International Context, c.1780-1980’, (Cambridge, forthcoming)
  • 'African Nationalist or British Loyalist? The Complicated Case of Tiyo Soga', History Workshop Journal 2011; doi: 10.1093/hwj/dbq047. Full text pdf
  • 'The Fairest Cape of them All? Cape Town in cinematic imagination', International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 34,1 (March 2010)
  • 'Film as evidence, film in history and film as history: some African perspectives', African Research and Documentation, 110 (2009)
  • 'Creating a city of the tourist imagination: the case of Cape Town', Urban Studies 46, 9 (August 2009)
  • ‘Urban History in the New South Africa: continuity and innovation since the end of apartheid’, Urban History 35 (2008), 288-315.
  • ‘Rosenstone on Film, Rosenstone on History’, Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice, vol. 11, no.4 (2007), pp.531-545.
  • ‘Writing about Englishness: South Africa’s Forgotten Nationalism’ in Graham McPhee and Prem Poddar (eds.), Empire and After: Englishness in Postcolonial Perspective, (Oxford and New York: Bergahn, 2006).
  • ‘How Urban South African Life was Represented in Film and Films Consumed in South African Cities in the 1950s’, Journal of the Interdisciplinary Crossroads, vol.3, no.2 (August 2006), pp. 431-42.
  • ‘The Betrayal of Creole Elites, 1880-1920’ in Sean Hawkins and Phillip D. Morgan (eds.), Black Experience and the Empire, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 194-227.
  • 'Revisiting Anglicisation in the Nineteenth Century Cape Colony', The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, vol xxxi, No. 2 (May 2003), pp.82-95 and in Carl Bridge and Kent Fedorowitch (eds.), The British World: Diaspora, Culture and Identity, (London, 2003), pp. 82-95.

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