Landscape phenomenology and the imagination of a new South Africa on Parktown Ridge

Abstract

Abstract This paper employs a phenomenological approach to examine the cultural appropriation of the physical landscape of Parktown Ridge immediately after the Anglo‐Boer War. It argues that the geographical circumstances of the Ridge in the early 1900s, when understood through the experiential constructs of spaciality, temporality and materiality, developed a powerful regional reciprocity with the cultural imagination of ‘New Imperialism’. The fundamental premise of the paper is that the processes of history are as much spatial as they are economic, racial and social, and that spatial histories in turn are rooted in phenomenological experience. It argues that such experience, while fundamentally subjective and therefore difficult to record, can be found in the poetics of inventive transformation which are evident in all forms of cultural representation. The creative strategies of Dorothea Fairbridge and Herbert Baker in particular are used to provide glimpses of the heterogeneous ‘spatial history’ of Parktown Ridge. By exploring the inescapably metaphoric commonality between physical circumstance and cultural representation, the paper argues that the experienc of living on Parktown Ridge naturalised a partly‐imperial, partly‐indigenous vision for the future of southern Africa, and thus exposes the inherently unresolved nature of imperialist attitudes towards landscape.