Disorient
Postcolonial Translations of Architectural Meaning in Johannesburg's Oriental Plaza
2022 - ongoing
Presented at Architecture in Africa's International Relations workshop, Accra (SOAS; AFI; University of Ghana)
Embedded Files
The Oriental Plaza, a large shopping centre surrounded by a sea of parking, claims fourteen city blocks of Fordsburg, a historic suburb just west of Johannesburg’s city centre. Its creation in the 1970s was an act of compromise, providing a retail infrastructure in the city for Indian traders displaced from the Fourteenth Street in Fietas, a neighbouring settlement where a diverse street life existed along pavements lined with house-shops.
In an era of segregationist policy, it was only in a space of otherness that the apartheid government would allow Indian culture to exist in the otherwise white urban landscape. A chasm in the finer urban grain of its context, the Plaza is effectively a mall that has no direct spatial relationship to the street. Its conflated internationally sourced architectural principles pay no respect to the South Asian descended community it serves. Rather, its image is of a modern orientalist citadel misguidedly conceptualised as a Middle Eastern bazaar.
Using theoretical expolorations of Edward Said’s Orientalism and Homi Bhabha’s expansion on Hybridity and Ambivalence, archival findings on the architecture and urban context, as well as ethnographic research, this paper aims to unpack the intercultural movements that made and unmade the exoticised space of the Plaza. As a materialisation of soft power, the architecture of the Plaza is considered through its evolving socio- cultural meaning in the changing political landscape of South Africa.
Page updated
Google Sites
Report abuse