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Abstract
This article considers the potential of drawing for studying subaltern architectures. The subaltern architectures under discussion are a series of markets in Cape Town, South Africa, which are occupied by refugees, asylum seekers and migrants from across the African continent. These are spaces that would usually fall outside typical architectural studies, as they are contested sites, often difficult to access and not found in formal spatial archives. This article asserts that these markets have a particular spatial value to their populations. It proposes that postcolonial studies and the concept of mimicry offer the potential to recognize the spatial value of these markets while remaining cognizant of the power dynamics at work in the process of researching subaltern spaces. One of the primary methods discussed is the use of architectural drawing as a means to study the often overlooked and unseen spatial practices of refugee markets.
Notes
1 A particularly salient exception is Suzanne Ewing, Michael J. McGowan, Chris Speed, and Victoria C. Bernie, eds., Architecture and Field/Work (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011), 4.
2 This was a point mentioned in numerous interviews throughout the course of the research, where asylum seekers and refugees noted the importance of informal trade to their ability to earn a livelihood and sustain themselves in South Africa.
3 There are no records of these markets in national or municipal archives, and they have not been the subject of studies in architectural or urban histories in Cape Town. The spatial and urban practices of African migrants to South Africa has emerged as a subject of study in Johannesburg in recent years as particularly evident in Sarah Nuttall and Achille Mbembe, eds., Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008). Cape Town, however, has largely evaded focus with a few exceptions: similar kinds of spaces have been mentioned most notably in a study of cross-border traders by Sally Peberdy and Jonathan Crush and the edited volume Imagining the City; Sally Peberdy and Jonathon Crush, “Trading Places: Cross-border Traders and the South African Informal Sector,” South African Migration Project, Migration Policy Series 6 (1998); Sean Fields, Renate Meyer, and Felicity Swanson, eds., Imagining the City (Cape Town: HSRC Press, 2007). However, in both these cases the emphasis is on the social dynamics rather than the spaces themselves, and they do not focus on the particular spaces discussed in this paper.
4 Skinner is referring to a broader context of studying informal trade on the African continent, yet this is a pertinent comment in relation to this study as it points to a further reason why these markets absent from formal records; Caroline Skinner, “Street Trade in Africa: Review,” School of Development Studies Working Paper 51 (2008), 1–38.
5 All names of interviewees mentioned in this paper have been changed, and all the interviews were conducted with written consent.
6 A “township” is the term used for an informal settlement in South Africa.
7 Haseena, interview, 2014.
8 “South Africa: Xenophobic Attacks Spreading,” in IRIN (May 23, 2008); Loren Landau and Aurelia Segatti, eds., Contemporary Migration to South Africa (Washington, DC: The World Bank, 2011), 10.
9 Ugen Vos, “Foreigners Fear Violence,” Citizen (Johannesburg) (2010), 6.
10 The definition of the subaltern used in this paper draws on Ranajit Guha’s understanding of the subaltern as a subordinate figure in comparison with elite populations, yet simultaneously recognizes that subalternity is heterogeneous and a relative construct; Ranajit Guha, “On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India,” in Subaltern Studies 1, ed. Ranajit Guha (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 44.
11 The newspaper archives that I drew on were primarily the Press Clipping Collection at the National Library of South Africa, which include articles from the Cape Times, Cape Argus and Die Burger. These date from 1955 to 1996. More recent articles were found using the digital archive database Sabinet.co.za. Throughout the research I conducted sixty-two interviews, and engaged in numerous other conversations. In addition to these sources I also drew on the artwork of Berni Searle, in particular Mute (2008), a video-art piece that was created in direct response to the xenophobic violence of 2008. It responds to the complexity of the time, and is also one of the few visual analyses of the xenophobic violence; Berni Searle, Mute (2008).
12 Most notable are the following anthologies: The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space, ed. Iain Borden, Jane Rendell, Joe Kerr and Alicia Pivaro (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000); Architecture of the Everyday, ed. Steven Harris and Deborah Berke (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1997); and Everyday Urbanism, ed. Margaret Crawford, John Chase, and John Kaliski (New York: Monacelli, 2008).
13 bell hooks, “Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness,” in Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (Boston: South End, 1990), 145–153; The framing of these sites as marginal is also in opposition to an emphasis on the popular within the field of everyday architectures; Dell Upton, “Architecture in Everyday Life,” New Literary History 33, no. 4 (2002): 707–723.
14 Gayatri Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Basingstoke: Macmillan Education, 1988), 271–313.
15 Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” 69.
16 Edward W. Said, “Representing the Colonized: Anthropology’s Interlocutors,” Critical Inquiry 15, no. 2 (1989), 205–225.
17 Ibid., 211.
18 Ibid., 210; also Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978).
19 Said, “Representing the Colonized,” 210.
20 Ibid., 213.
21 Ibid., 212.
22 Fieldwork notes, 2014.
23 The centre is South Africa’s only dedicated detention holding centre for undocumented migrants in the country. It was opened in 1996.
24 Haseena, interview, 2014.
25 All names of migrants, asylum seekers and refugees have been changed.
26 Said, “Representing the Colonized.”
27 Where it was agreed, I recorded interviews. Yet, in some cases, particularly among women, although they agreed to talk to me, they did not want their voices recorded. The concerns were similar to those raised around photography.
28 John Berger, Bento’s Sketchbook (London: Verso, 2015).
29 Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”
30 John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin, 1972).
31 Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” 91.
32 Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994).
33 Ibid., 131.
34 Neil Carrier and Emma Lochery, “Missing States? Somali Trade Networks and the Eastleigh Transformation,” Journal of East African Studies 7, no. 2 (2013): 334–352; Mulki Al-Sharmani, “Contemporary Migration and Transnational Families: The Case of Somali Diaspora(s),” in Migration and Refugee Movements in the Middle East and North Africa (Cairo: American University in Cairo, 2007), 1–16; Elizabeth Campbell, “Economic Globalization from Below,” in Cities in Contemporary Africa, ed. Martin J. Murray and Garth A. Myers (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2006), 125–147; Kenneth Omeje and John Mwangi, “Business Travails in the Diaspora: The Challenges and Resilience of Somali Refugee Business Community in Nairobi, Kenya,” Journal of Third World Studies 31, no. 1 (2014): 185–217; Lorenzo Rinelli and Sam Okoth Opondo, “Affective Economies: Eastleigh’s Metalogistics, Urban Anxieties and the Mapping of Diasporic City Life,” African and Black Diaspora 6, no. 2 (2013): 236–250.
35 Noeleen Murray, “Critical Architecture and the Spatial Humanities,” presented at Faces of the City Seminar Series (2013). Johannesburg: University of the Witwatersrand, 1–15.
36 Paul Emmons, “Drawing Sites: Site Drawings,” in Ewing et al., Architecture and Field/Work, 119–128.
37 Ewing et al., Architecture and Field/Work, 4.
38 Izumi Kuroishi, “Visual Examinations of Interior Space in Movements to Modernize Housing in Japan c.1920–1940,” Interiors 2, no. 1 (2011): 95–123.
39 Ibid.
40 Swati Chattopadhyay, Representing Calcutta (London: Routledge, 2005); Swati Chattopadhyay, Unlearning the City: Infrastructure in a New Optical Field (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012).
41 Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” 69.
42 Ibid., 91.
43 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).
44 Berger, Bento’s Sketchbook, 10.
45 Tim Ingold, “Drawing Together: Materials, Gestures, Lines,” in Experiments in Holism: Theory and Practice in Contemporary Anthropology, ed. Ton Otto and Nils Bubandt (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010). In addition to Ingold’s writing, the field of visual ethnography engages with drawing. The majority of this work is, however, through audiovisual means or photography. Notable exceptions include: Anna Grimshaw, The Ethnographer’s Eye (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); and Ana Isabel Afonso, Laszlo Kurti, and Sarah Pink, ed., Working Images (London: Routledge, 2004).
46 Lesley McFadyen, “Practice Drawing Writing Object,” in Redrawing Anthropology, ed. Tim Ingold (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 33–43.
47 Ibid.
48 Ingold, “Drawing Together: Materials, Gestures, Lines.”
49 Said, “Representing the Colonized,” 225.
50 McFadyen, “Practice Drawing Writing Object,” 42.