"Displacement, Museums, and Memory: Lessons from South Africa"

Panel of leading museum professionals and scholars from South Africa - Divided City Lecture

As some area residents know all too well, one of the factors contributing to the 2014 protests in Ferguson and the greater St. Louis area was a chain of forced migration. Many of the African-American residents of Canfield Green, the site of Michael Brown’s shooting, had been evicted from the neighboring town of Kinloch, Missouri, where airport expansion removed nearly 4,000 people from their homes. The Kinloch expulsion was only the most recent episode in a series of urban removals, which include the 1970s demolition of the Pruitt Igoe public housing project and the 1950s Mill Creek Valley clearance. By shattering communities, each dispossession rendered displaced residents vulnerable to the type of systematic injustices laid bare in Ferguson.

“Displacement, Museums, and Memories: Lessons from South Africa” features South African activists, scholars and curators reflecting on the innovative practices they have developed to recover and preserve stories of displaced communities and involuntary urban relocations in South Africa. The panel will include an audience-focused discussion of which lessons from South Africa might be useful to the work of activists, scholars, and curators here in St. Louis.

PANEL PARTICIPANTS

  • Ciraj Rassool, Professor of History and Director of the African Programme in Museum and Heritage Studies at the University of the Western Cape in South Africa
  • Leslie Witz, Professor in the History Department at the University of the Western Cape in Cape Town, South Africa. His major research centers around how different histories are created and represented in the public domain through memorials, museums and festivals and tourism.
  • Noëleen Murray, Director of the Wits City Institute and the A.W. Mellon Foundation Chair of Critical Architecture and Urbanism at the University of the Witwatersrand and co-author of Hostels, Homes Museum: Memoralising Migrant Labour Pasts in Lwandle, South Africa.
  • Chrischene Julius, Head of the Collections Department, District Six Museum, Cape Town South Africa
  • Moderated by Sarah Pharaon, Senior Director of Methodology and Practice at the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience

This workshop is supported by The Divided City, a joint project of Washington University in St. Louis's Center for the Humanities and Sam Fox School, and is presented in partnership with the University of Missouri--St. Louis. The project is funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation's Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities initiative.