Imagining Black Feminist Geographies of Johannesburg Through Senzeni Marasela’s Creative (Un/Re)mapping of Johannesburg’s Mine Slopes

Overview

Part of the project of philosophy is to problematise how the world is known, including destabilising geography as one of the dominant imperialist discourses. In the Afropolis, legacies of colonialism and Apartheid still work to uphold spatial inequality within urban spaces in ways that are both racialised and gendered. Black feminist scholar, Katherine McKittrick, provides a fruitful theoretical foundation to consider postcolonial cities from a renewed epistemological perspective. In the 2006 book Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle, McKittrick works alongside and across traditional geographies through critical black geographies that centre a black feminist sense of place. In considering ‘a black sense of place’, McKittrick demonstrates how transatlantic slavery enforced and naturalised the connection between blackness and placelessness. She writes to document black women geographies and provides a narrative that locates and draws on black histories and black subjects to ‘make visible social lives which are often displaced, rendered ungeographic’. This paper places McKittrick in conversation with the work of South African artist Senzeni Marasela through their selected literary and artistic works to explore alternative feminist geographies of Johannesburg’s decommissioned mine slopes/dumps, and to emphasise the liberatory potential of a black feminist point of departure in relation to the mining–industrial complex. The argument is not merely that Johannesburg needs to become more inclusive to black feminist understandings of place, but rather that the centring of black feminist geographical knowledges has the subversive ability to reshape how the city is known in the first place. In doing so, this paper hopes to ‘raise questions about the ground beneath our feet, and how we are all implicated in the production of space’.