Modernity's Abject Space: The Rise and Fall of Durban's Cato Manor

Abstract

Recent work on the history of urbanization in South Africa suggests that the development of urban apartheid policy was influenced by the broader discourses of modernization and planning which guided the morphology of urban areas in the industrial West. Less attention, however, has been given to the ways in which these discourses of modernization served to define and control certain forms of subjectivity within the urban order. Accordingly, in this paper I examine the relationship between urban policy and public discourses about race and space in the city of Durban in the 1940s. In the first part of the paper I argue that the development of urban apartheid was marked by a modernist impulse to define and control the subjects and spaces of the city. This control was fostered by new circuits of power designed to produce racialized working subjects and the orderly and efficient management of urban space. Despite these attempts, however, Indian and African residents created informal spaces on the outskirts of the city, spaces which posed a challenge to the political and economic hegemony of the white settler population. In the second part of the paper, I draw upon Julia Kristeva's notion of abjection to argue that one such space—an area known as Cato Manor—became a repository of larger fears about the changing nature of identity and alterity within the city. These abject fears burst into public consciousness in 1949, after an Indian–African ‘riot’ in Cato Manor called into question the efficacy of the city's attempts to manage the social and spatial contours of urbanization. In response, the city set about enacting policies of formal residential segregation, policies which can be read as attempts to manage the troubling presence of racialized ‘others’ through spatial control.