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Reimagining Urban Truth

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Colonial Heritage and Urban Transformation in the Global South

Part of the book series: Studies in Art, Heritage, Law and the Market ((SAHLM,volume 2))

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Abstract

In this chapter, I think about the messy materiality of the ruined landscapes of Cape Town’s District One and District Six. I discuss ways of connecting the traces in these landscapes with degraded or silenced historical and contemporary personhoods. In collaboration with photographer Dirk-Jan Visser, I explore and imagine ways of giving the afterlives of these fractured bodies and material objects renewed agency in the urban archive that is the city.

This chapter was published in an adapted form in a collection edited by Laura McAtackney and Krysta Ryzewski: Contemporary Archaeology and the City: Creativity, Ruination, and Political Action, published by Oxford University Press in 2017. Permission by Oxford University Press to reproduce this chapter is hereby acknowledged.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of History, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Maastricht University, Maastricht, The Netherlands

    Christian Ernsten

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  1. Christian Ernsten
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Ernsten, C. (2021). Reimagining Urban Truth. In: Colonial Heritage and Urban Transformation in the Global South. Studies in Art, Heritage, Law and the Market, vol 2. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85806-3_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85806-3_7

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-85805-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-85806-3

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