Triangulating Death
The Place of the Cemetery in Johannesburg's Racialised Landscape
2025
Book Chapter: Routledge Critical Companion to Race and Architecture
edited by Itohan Osayimwese & Felipe Hernandez
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This chapter explores the racialisation of geographies in the city of Johannesburg, using its deathscape as a site from which to read social and spatial relations. These are enforced by multi-dimensional violences that are material, spatial, and archival. A time-space locus that occupies a subterranean space in the landscape is identified to conceptualise the spatial persistence of these racial violences in the city, in the form of the mining compound, location, township, cemetery, and other sites of disposession. Here, the necropower of the apartheid state is inscribed into geographical space, subjugating Black life to the power of killing. Cemeteries in the city are sites which track these violences. They are, however, also sites which contain the materiality with which to assert the cultural presence of marginalised communities that face erasure. These deathscapes are grounds on which racialised others can reclaim connections to landscapes through archival imaginaries.
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