Dwelling in displacement : land rights and heritage activism in post-apartheid Johannesburg
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Questions of land rights deeply structure post-apartheid life in urban South Africa. This dissertation explores land activism through two heritage museums in Johannesburg, South Africa: The Fietas Museum in Fietas, and the Sophiatown Museum in Sophiatown. Both areas suffered catastrophic forced removals under apartheid, and both former and current residents continue to grapple with the implications of land-based justice in the present day. Drawing on extensive ethnographic and archival fieldwork in Johannesburg, this dissertation first argues that as a result of the restitutional delays of a market-driven land claims process, these heritage museums have emerged to catalyze land restitution both within and outside of the legal system. However, these efforts contribute to new forms of displacement and to new forms of dwelling, both for former and current residents. Moreover, I do not position displacement and dwelling as oppositional: instead, I extend a recent trend in the anthropology of migration to retheorize displacement both as physical mobility and as the psychic condition of being unsettled in place. Relatedly, I find that the Sophiatown and Fietas museums emplace certain groups while simultaneously displacing others; mount certain exhibitions by refusing to mount others; champion certain events in history while simultaneously deemphasizing others; and exist within a geographic footprint while simultaneously engaging in political, economic, social, and digital forms of advocacy that may extend their reach beyond their physically inscribed borders. Far from being exceptional in this way, my research instead points to a more general dynamic between absence and presence within heritage sites: there is value in attending to the often "unmarked" (Phelan 1996) silences that give shape to the commemorative acts, museological spaces, objects, and histories that become 'heritagized' through the practices of collecting and display. This dissertation consequently proposes a new framework for analyzing the heritage site that attends equally to absence as to presence.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2022; ©2022 |
| Publication date | 2022; 2022 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Reid, Jasmine Whitney |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Ebron, Paulla A, 1953- |
| Degree supervisor | Meskell, Lynn |
| Thesis advisor | Ebron, Paulla A, 1953- |
| Thesis advisor | Meskell, Lynn |
| Thesis advisor | Hecht, Gabrielle |
| Thesis advisor | Inoue, Miyako, 1962- |
| Thesis advisor | Witz, Leslie |
| Degree committee member | Hecht, Gabrielle |
| Degree committee member | Inoue, Miyako, 1962- |
| Degree committee member | Witz, Leslie |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Anthropology |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Jasmine Reid. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Anthropology. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2022. |
| Location | https://purl.stanford.edu/sy577yp3449 |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2022 by Jasmine Whitney Reid
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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