Landscape phenomenology and the imagination of a new South Africa on Parktown Ridge

Datos Bibliográficos

ID2138902
AutoresJeremy Foster (Royal Holloway University of London, autor de correspondencia)
Año1996
Volumen55
Número2
Páginas93-126
Fecha de publicación1996-01-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaAfrican Studies (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0002-0184 • E-ISSN: 1469-2872
EditorialInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/00020189608707852
OpenAlexW2014861427
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas3
Referencias citadas17

This paper employs a phenomenological approach to examine the cultural appropriation of the physical landscape of Parktown Ridge immediately after the Anglo‐Boer War. It argues that the geographical circumstances of the Ridge in the early 1900s, when understood through the experiential constructs of spaciality, temporality and materiality, developed a powerful regional reciprocity with the cultural imagination of 'New Imperialism'. The fundamental premise of the paper is that the processes of history are as much spatial as they are economic, racial and social, and that spatial histories in turn are rooted in phenomenological experience. It argues that such experience, while fundamentally subjective and therefore difficult to record, can be found in the poetics of inventive transformation which are evident in all forms of cultural representation. The creative strategies of Dorothea Fairbridge and Herbert Baker in particular are used to provide glimpses of the heterogeneous 'spatial history' of Parktown Ridge. By exploring the inescapably metaphoric commonality between physical circumstance and cultural representation, the paper argues that the experienc of living on Parktown Ridge naturalised a partly‐imperial, partly‐indigenous vision for the future of southern Africa, and thus exposes the inherently unresolved nature of imperialist attitudes towards landscape

Aesthetics · Appropriation · Art · Epistemology · Indigenous · Literature · Materiality (auditing · Phenomenology (philosophy · Poetics · Poetry · Sociology · Temporality · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Anthropology · Geographies of human-animal interactions · History · Philosophy · South African History and Culture