Between Recognition and Resistance: Navigating memories of violence and injustice in Hillbrow and Constitution Hill

Abstract

This research is an exploration into how affective and spatial stories of people’s everyday realities in Johannesburg, South Africa, intersect with the mnemonic discourses of violence, marginalisation and injustice from apartheid. Basing itself between Hillbrow and Constitution Hill, a former apartheid-era prison and current site of memory, this research foregrounds the affective, physiological, spatial, social and historical experiences that contribute to the strands of memory in the city on an intersectional basis. In a context wherein the grind of the everyday is punctuated with inherited forms of injustice and distrust, the data presented unpicks the production of survival strategies, new ways of processing and adaptive social discourses adopted across racial, generational and gendered and queer experiences.

This research contributes to emerging literature on memory and the global south, centralising Africanist epistemologies into the generation of new theory and knowledge production on the continent for
postcolonial memory studies. By adopting key literature on ‘entanglements’, per Nuttall (2008), on ‘fractures’, per Adebayo (2023), ‘colonial logics’, per Mwambari (2023), or ‘memory standardisation’, per
David (2017), this research unpicks points of conflict and resistance in the production of memory from the margins. Adopting oral history, ethnography and participatory action research (photo voice and a newly conceptualised method entitled ‘affective mapping’), this research discerns the ways in which apartheid memory can interrupt and intersperse, as well as be precluded from, narrations of injustice, place-making and survival strategies in the present. In this way, such commentaries become partial, overlaid with affective and spatial markers in how identities are negotiated, selectively acknowledging, appropriating and refusing apartheid epistemologies in communicating such experiences of youth, gender and sexuality.

Through 31 interviews, weekly workshops with a group of 15 participant-photographers and wider creative and ethnographic inputs, the memory strands brought together in this research articulate forms of injustice, exclusion, livelihoods, friendship, violence, ‘injury’ and ‘struggle’ amongst groups, predominantly youth, in Hillbrow, connecting connect such markers into wider social, political and mnemonic residues of apartheid.

Date of Award	25 Jun 2025
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Bath
Supervisor	Pete Manning (Supervisor), Stacey Hynd (Supervisor), Emily Bridger (Supervisor) & Jordan Tchilingirian (Supervisor)