Routes to Sophiatown

Bibliographic Data

ID2137754
AuthorsNatasha Erlank (0000-0003-2468-5844, University of Johannesburg, corresponding author)
Year2015
Volume74
Issue1
Pages26-50
Publication date2015-01-02
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueAfrican Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0002-0184 • E-ISSN: 1469-2872
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/00020184.2014.998060
OpenAlexW2153752779
LanguageEN
References cited32

What is Sophiatown? Is it a vibrant black, urbanity, or a more tragic recollection: the suburb that was destroyed by the apartheid state's forced removals of black South Africans from areas proclaimed white from the 1950s onwards. Both of these representations have considerable contemporary traction. The former lends itself to a very nostalgic view of the suburb, the South African rainbow nation transported into a multi-cultural and cooperative past, while anti-apartheid commemorative initiatives highlight the removals beginning in February 1955. Neither of these representations, though, reflects the entirety of Sophiatown's histories, including of when it was called Triomf. This article brings together the different histories and representations of Sophiatown, showing their messy connection with one another, through a consideration of two linked sets of ideas: in the first place, space viewed as socially-produced draws attention to the multiply-constructed nature of the landscape known as Sophiatown. In the second, attention to the quotidian accounts which Sophiatown residents produce about their lives reveals the way in which space and place (house and home, daily travel routes) work to overlap the familiar with the unfamiliar. The first set of ideas looks to ideas of space as politically-contingent, the second to the processual role it plays in how people remember their everyday lives

Aesthetics · Art · Economy · Mainstream · Political science · Sociology · Space (punctuation) · State (computer science · Urbanity · White (mutation · African history and culture studies · Gender Studies · History · Law · Public Spaces through Art · South African History and Culture

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