Washed with Sun
Landscape and the Making of White South Africa
Published on 15. August 2014
377 pages
978-0-8229-8035-3 (ISBN)
Description
South Africa is recognized as a site of both political turmoil and natural beauty, and yet little work has been done in connecting these defining national characteristics. Washed with Sun achieves this conjunction in its multidisciplinary study of South Africa as a space at once natural and constructed. Weaving together practical, aesthetic, and ideological analyses, Jeremy Foster examines the role of landscape in forming the cultural iconographies and spatialities that shaped the imaginary geography of emerging nationhood. Looking in particular at the years following the British victory in the second Boer War, from 1902 to 1930, Foster discusses the influence of painting, writing, architecture, and photography on the construction of a shared, romanticized landscape subjectivity that was perceived as inseparable from "being South African," and thus helped forge the imagined community of white South Africa. In its innovative approach to South Africa's history, Washed with Sun breaks important new ground, combining the persuasive theory of cultural geography with the material specificity of landscape history.
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07/2008
University of Pittsburgh Press
€95.46
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Person
Jeremy Foster teaches architecture and planning at Cornell University. His articles have appeared in numerous publications, including Journal of Historical Geography, Cultural Geographies, and Journal of Southern African Studies.
Content
- Intro
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- 1. Introduction: Landscape, Character, and Analogical Imagination
- 2. From Imperialism to Nationalism: South Africanism and the Politics of White Nationhood
- 3. Visual Representation, Discursive Landscape, and "A Simple Life in a Genial Climate"
- 4. Between Corporeality and Representation: Theoretical and Methodological Excursus
- 5. Baden-Powell and the Siege of Mafeking: The Enactment of Mythical Place
- 6. John Buchan's Hesperides: The Aesthetics of Improvement on the Highveld
- 7. Prospect, Materiality, and the Horizons of Potentiality on Parktown Ridge
- 8. Mrs. Everard's Lonely Career: The Komati Valley and the Depiction of Nostalgic Displacement
- Color plates
- 9. Modernity, Memory, and the South African Railways: The Iconography of Emptiness
- 10. The Life and Afterlife of a Contrapuntal Subjectivity
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
