On burial grounds and city spaces: Reconfiguring the normative

Abstract

City spaces, landscape, the built environment and architectural forms that dominate the visual field and spatial template of the urban spaces we inhabit reflect on the one hand hegemonic Cartesian mappings and spatialities, and on the other are imbued in particular ways of seeing and ways of knowing. Within a linear spatial and temporal frame, the above ground is divorced from the below ground, the dead from the living and subject from object. The below ground is rendered an object of study within particular disciplinary regimes that enact protocols, languages and ways of seeing. I use burial grounds and carnival practices in the city of Cape Town as archives that anchor attempts at undisciplining heavily policed senses and ways of knowing the present and the past in the contemporary post-apartheid city. The lines drawn by carnival practices as well as the internal sense of time offer a set of alternative imaginaries and memoryscapes of the postcolonial city. I work through a notion of embodied cartographies that epistemically unsettle the normative frame and mapping of the urban neoliberal complex, disjunctively connecting the above ground to the below ground, the living to the dead, the township to the city and knowledge practices to the imaginary.