Commemorating and Forgetting: Challenges far the New South Africa

摘要

Martin J. Murray is a preeminent scholar of the impact that recent social and political changes have had on South Africa's built environment. His previous book, Taming the Disorderly City (2008), offered a trenchant, highly readable analysis of how, within less than two decades, the transition to a postapartheid society created a new kind of metropolis in Johannesburg-one in which the global and African, as well as "developed" and "developing," forms of urbanism coexist in ways that are sometimes exhilarating, sometimes disturbing. He explored how political and economic dynamics during the democratic transition have transformed how this sprawling, schizophrenic, yet compelling city is inhabited and perceived and how this has played out in the destruction, renewal, and replacement of its buildings, infrastructures, and landscapes. In Commemorating and Forgetting, Murray turns his attention to a less obvious but equally critical aspect of this unsettling of the built environment in South Africa: collective memory.