Always looking’: visual and artistic explorations of the living legacies of enslavement in South Africa

Abstract

In the context of marginalised slave histories in South Africa, I explore the poetic and artistic strategies of artists and cultural organisations in evoking slave memory in the present. I examine how the work of contemporary artists such as Gabrielle Goliath, Bronwyn Katz and Berni Searle, among others, eschew colonially-informed practices of commemoration in favour of artistic methodologies that centre care, recuperation and repair. I look to the work of independent, activist cultural organisations such as the District Six Museum and the Prestwich Place Committee that evoke the memory of enslavement in the present through collective, public-oriented acts of remembrance. I draw direct correlations between historic, VOC-era Cape of Good Hope and contemporary Cape Town, to elucidate how the living legacies of enslavement shape urban space, aesthetics, and social stratification. I employ an interdisciplinary, Black feminist-informed research methodology to centre the life stories of enslaved women and to reappraise narratives concerning the VOC settler-colony. Through engagements with the speculative, as proposed by scholars such as Saidiya Hartman (2008), Yvette Abrahams (1996) and others, and Jennifer Nash’s theorisation on “beautiful writing” as a reparative tool (2019b), I engage with the political underpinnings of historiography and interrogate the ethics of knowledge production. My analysis demonstrates that in content and methodology, the artistic, speculative and commemorative work explored provides new insight into the legacies of enslavement and the implications of these legacies for those living in Cape Town today.