Coda

Abstract

The legacy of nineteenth-century colonialism continues to impact object relations and museum culture of the present, which, in turn, provide lessons to readers of nineteenth-century British realism and its colonial archive. One institution in particular, Cape Town’s District Six Museum, pursues the reconstruction of history as an ongoing, communal project open to public collaboration. Featuring multi-media displays, personal and public records, audio recorded testimonies, on-site excavations, and tours within the museum as well as without, this museum places its objects in the service of the ongoing struggle to re-member and reclaim the last multi-racial neighborhood in Cape Town to undergo forced removal and relocation, in 1968, after over a century of organized removals. While the lands on which this community once thrived became the object of public dispute and government appropriation, many of the more mundane objects that sustained the daily lives of its former residents remained – hidden beneath the bulldozed rubble of the buildings that housed them. The District Six Museum highlights its archaeological project of returning to this site as the material archive of an ever-present history as well as the materialization of a collective trauma.