Sophiatown Reimagined: Residents' Reconstructions of Place and Memory

Abstract

The aim of the research behind this article was to develop and apply different interactional contexts for residents within the fractured suburb of Sophiatown, Johannesburg, with a view to exploring their conflicting and familiar relationships to the past, space, and community through narrative and visual exercises centred around the creation of personal histories. I was investigating the means by which to restore agency within everyday life as people become aware that their thoughts and actions shape the space within which they live, and in turn the future. I was hoping that these different conversations around the past would then nurture a curiosity about others' pasts, and to some extent even deconstruct their sense of others' 'otherness'; in this sense, the article is an alternative to 'grand histories' not just of South Africa, but of other spaces too.