Falling Monuments, Reluctant Ruins: The Persistence of the Past in the Architecture of Apartheid interrogates how, in the era of decolonisation, post-apartheid South Africa reckons with its past in order to shape its future. Architects, historians, artists, social anthropologists and urban planners seek answers in this book to complex and unsettling questions around heritage, ruins and remembrance. What do we do with hollow memorials and political architectural remnants? Which should remain, which forgotten, and which dismantled? The contributors examine the influence of public memory, planning and activism on such anguished places of oppression, resistance and defiance. Their focus on visible markers in the landscape to interrogate our past will make readers reconsider these spaces, looking at their landscape and history anew. Through a series of 14 empirically grounded chapters and over 48 images, the contributors seek to understand how, in the decades following the dismantling of apartheid, architecture contests or subverts these persistent conditions in order to promote social justice, land reclamation and urban rehabilitation. This ground-breaking collection is an important resource for professionals, academics and activists working in South Africa today.
Table des matières
Acknowledgements List of Figures Foreword – Muchaparara Musemwa Introduction – Hilton Judin Part One: Lands Chapter 1 Land Dispossession and the Ghosts of the Medupi Power Station – Faeeza Ballim Chapter 2 A Community Journey: Return to Juliwe Cemetery in Roodepoort, Johannesburg – Eric Itzkin Chapter 3 Public Memory and Transformation at Constitution Hill and Gandhi Square in Johannesburg – Temba John Dawson Middelmann Chapter 4 Ejaradini: Notes Towards Modelling Black Gardens as a Response to the Coloniality of Museums – MADEYOULOOK Part Two: Buildings Chapter 5 Johannesburg Central Police Station and the Photograph as Evidence – Sally Gaule Chapter 6 The Persistence of Robben Island: Abolition and the Prison Museum – Kelly Gillespie Chapter 7 The Apartheid Pass Office in Johannesburg and a Heritage of Destruction – Hilton Judin Chapter 8 Indian Trading, Art Deco Buildings and Urban Modernity in a Segregated Town: Jubilee House in Krugersdorp – Arianna Lissoni and Roshan Dadoo Chapter 9 An Uncertain Heritage and Resistance: Transforming the Drill Hall in Johannesburg – Barbara Morovich and Pauline Guinard Part Three: Statues, as Monuments Chapter 10 Creating Spaces of Memorialisation: New Delville Wood (France) and SS Mendi (South Africa) – Yasmin Mayat and Brendan Hart Chapter 11 Re-historicising Credo Mutwa’s Kwa Khaya Lendaba Cultural Village in Soweto – Ali Khangela Hlongwane and Tara Weber Chapter 12 Facing (Down) the Coloniser? The Mandela Statue at Cape Town’s City Hall – Cynthia Kros Chapter 13 ‘Where’s Our Monument?’ Commemorating Indian Indentured Labour in South Africa –Goolam Vahed Chapter 14 Decolonisation, Monuments, and a New Architectural Language – Nnamdi Elleh Contributors Index
A propos de l’auteur
Goolam Vahed is a professor in the Department of History at the University of Kwa Zulu-Natal.