An 'Indian commons' in Durban? Limits to mutuality, or the city to come

bibliographic database
Line

Periodical article

Title:	An 'Indian commons' in Durban? Limits to mutuality, or the city to come
Author:	Chari, Sharad
Year:	2014
Periodical:	Anthropology Southern Africa (ISSN 2332-3264)
Volume:	37
Pages:	149-159
Language:	English
Geographic term:	South Africa
Subjects:	Black people Indians memory desegregation
Abstract:	This paper explores the ways in which memories of Black South Africans in Durban, identified by racial discourse and often by themselves as Indian and Coloured, reach back to early twentieth century processes of dispossession and occupation. Through historical and ethnographic research in (formerly Coloured) Wentworth and (formerly Indian) Merebank in South Durban, the author shows how some people from Merebank imagine their past and present in relation to a still-recognisable and creolized 'Indian commons' forged a century back, while their neighbours in Wentworth recall constant change and dislocation. These distinct modes of reckoning with the past, with questions of land and landscape, and with practices of racialized mutuality, point to the limits of a subaltern 'Indian commons' but also to the possibility of a different mutuality. Bibliogr., notes, sum. [Journal abstract]