Panel at the 8th European Conference on African Studies (ECAS), Edinburgh

The panel seeks papers that consider possible alternatives to South Africa’s current civic narrative through new types of architectural forms that not only speak to South Africa’s history but also the volatility of the nation’s current identity.

Abstract: In the two decades following South Africa’s first democratic election, the nation has undergone numerous social, cultural, and political transformations towards generating a unified national identity in the face of the lingering remnants of apartheid. The explosive growth of conciliatory spaces reflecting a largely Western tradition of civic architecture including museums, commemorative monuments, and public memorials have attempted to shape a new national consciousness by facilitating therapeutic encounters with South Africa’s traumatic past while presenting a unified national identity in the face of the lingering remnants of apartheid. Yet in an atmosphere of increased “Afro-pessimism” (Marschall, 2008) brought about by two decades of social, political, and economic stagnation, many such spaces have come to be viewed rather skeptically as monolithic constructs that represent a largely sanitized narrative of South African history and identity. The panel seeks papers that consider possible alternatives to South Africa’s current civic narrative through new types of architectural forms that not only speak to South Africa’s history but also the volatility of the nation’s current identity. Specifically, panelists are asked to consider how one should define civic architecture in 21st century South Africa and whether certain structures and spaces have the potential to become “civic” based on the idea of  “an architecture for all.” To this end, panelists might consider case studies that express multiple social, cultural, and political narratives at once, as well as structures that actively push back against Western canons of nationalistic architecture towards privileging forms more attuned to the country’s unique historical legacies.