Conference Abstracts
10. Brown, Duncan; University of KwaZulu-Natal, South
Africa:
"Narrative, Memory and Mapping: Ronnie Govender’s
“At the Edge” and Other Cato Manor Stories"
In “At the Edge” and Other Cato Manor
Stories, Ronnie Govender offers a series of narratives of life in
the urban settlement of Cato Manor from the 1940s until its destruction
in 1958/9. Against the strict delineation of identity, the control
of space, a state narrative of racial separation and displacement,
and an official cartography (of race and economics), Govender sets
an unofficial cartography of knowing, belonging and growing, a stature
in ordinary character, an oral-influenced mobility of storytelling,
a carnivalesque chorus of voices, the ingenuity of tactic - as well
as the desolation of suffering and destruction which was to follow
the bulldozing of Cato Manor and the forced removal of its residents.
While the stories deal specifically with the destruction of Cato
Manor, they resonate with larger claims about South African Indian
identities, without simply essentialising or valorising them, and
without constructing them as identities of exclusion or glossing
over areas of difficulty or prejudice; questions of alienation,
belonging, immigration, exoticism and indigeneity swirl through
the narrative landscape of the collection. Govender’s stories
speak powerfully to the postcolonial city of today.
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