(2024) ABSENT Presences - introduction (original) (raw)
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Outside the Dwelling of Culture: Estrangement and Difference in Postcolonial Zululand
Anthropological Quarterly, 2010
Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance was distinguished by its strongly dialectical analysis of Zionist Christian practice in apartheid South Africa, showing how Zionist ritual worked with the largest questions of power under a form of colonial capitalism. In this paper, I explore how dialectics of estrangement structure practices directed at the spirits of the dead in post- apartheid South Africa. I do so through an ethnographic study of the practice of building dwellings for the dead in the Zululand region, showing how this practice works with the legacies of political violence and labor migration, while enacting the deeply ambivalent production of forms of ethnocultural difference.
Archaeology dreaming: post-apartheid urban imaginaries and the bones
This article is concerned with the materiality of memory and identity in the post-colony, as mediated by the corporeal remains of the colonial underclasses themselves. Prestwich Street is in a rapidly gentrifying part of Cape Town, close to the Waterfront, the city's glitzy international zone. The accidental discovery of an early colonial burial site in Prestwich Street in the course of construction activities in May 2003, and its subsequent exhumation, became the occasion of a fiercely contested public campaign. This pitted pro-exhumation heritage managers, archaeologists and property developers against an alliance of community activists, spiritual leaders and First Nations representatives. The materiality of the site and its remains became a key point of focus for the working out of a range of forces and interests in post-apartheid society, including the buried legacies of slavery and colonialism in the city, the memory of apartheid forced removals, and post-apartheid struggles over restitution and representation. I argue that, even as the heightened political contexts of the events around Prestwich Street significantly determine the shape and nature of an emergent post-apartheid public sphere (on the one
MOHOA Considering the Curious Case of the Satyagraha House, Johannesburg. A Curatorial Critique
Curator: The Museum Journal, 2022
What can the case of Satyagraha House, the luxury guesthouse and museum complex established on the site of a domestic building briefly inhabited by Mohandas Gandhi from 1908 to 1909, suggest about the complexities attached to heritage and preservation in the contemporary South African context? What can this hybrid museum and guesthouse space offer to advance dialogue around the heritage of modern Africa, which will allow alternatives to the 'traditional' museum to emerge? Equally, when innovative modes of presenting heritage arise as a result of initiatives from outside the country, the need to pay due diligence to local memory and understanding is considered here as being of paramount importance. Failure to do this, as, I argue, has inadvertently taken place at Satyagraha House, will place modern museum practice in South Africa as belonging to the past rather than to the present and future of modern African heritage.
The Apartheid Museum: Performing a Spatial Dialectics
Journal of Visual Culture, 2009
The Apartheid Museum in South Africa is read through the lens of a condition of `prepossession', where histories of trauma continue to haunt a site while manifesting affectively through spatial ambiguities, which lead to an experience of `empathetic unsettledness'. Paradoxes concerning the provenance of the building and its location are discussed. An analysis follows of changing registers of spatiality through selected key areas of the complex, with reference to Henri Lefebvre's analysis of alternative experiences of space. His notion of `lived' space is applicable to trauma architecture as discussed by concentration camp researcher Wolfgang Sofsky. It is argued that the building critically performs a content which exceeds the limits of representation, thus engendering a sense of embodied unease. Further complications include the appropriation of suffering in dialectical tension with a moving commemoration of apartheid iniquities.
2019
This book series serves as a scholarly forum on African contributions to and negotiations of diverse modernities over time and space, with a particular emphasis on historical developments. Specifically, it aims to refute the hegemonic conception of a singular modernity, Western in origin, spreading out to encompass the globe over the last several decades. Indeed, rather than reinforcing conceptual boundaries or parameters, the series instead looks to receive and respond to changing perspectives on an important but inherently nebulous idea, deliberately creating a space in which multiple modernities can interact, overlap, and conflict. While privileging works that emphasize historical change over time, the series will also feature scholarship that blurs the lines between the historical and the contemporary, recognizing the ways in which our changing understandings of modernity in the present have the capacity to affect the way we think about African and global histories.