Washed With Sun

by Foster, Jeremy

• ISBN13: 9780822943327
• ISBN10: 0822943328
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-07-01
• Publisher: Univ of Pittsburgh Pr

Summary

South Africa is recognized as a site of both political turmoil and natural beauty, and yet little work has been done in connecting these defining national characteristics.Washed with Sun achieves this conjunction in its multidisciplinary study of South Africa as a space at once natural and constructed. Weaving together practical, aesthetic, and ideological analyses, Jeremy Foster examines the role of landscape in forming the cultural iconographies and spatialities that shaped the imaginary geography of emerging nationhood. Looking in particular at the years following the British victory in the second Boer War, from 1902 to 1930, Foster discusses the influence of painting, writing, architecture, and photography on the construction of a shared, romanticized landscape subjectivity that was perceived as inseparable from "being South African," and thus helped forge the imagined community of white South Africa. In its innovative approach to South Africa's history,Washed with Sunbreaks important new ground, combining the persuasive theory of cultural geography with the material specificity of landscape history.

Author Biography

Jeremy Foster teaches architecture and planning at Cornell University. His articles have appeared in numerous publications, including Journal of Historical Geography, Cultural Geographies, and Journal of South African Studies.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Introduction: Landscape, Character, and Analogical Imagination	p. 1
From Imperialism to Nationalism: South Africanism and the Politics of White Nationhood	p. 14
Visual Representation, Discursive Landscape, and "A Simple Life in a Genial Climate"	p. 45
Between Corporeality and Representation: Theoretical and Methodological Excursus	p. 80
Baden-Powell and the Siege of Mafeking: The Enactment of Mythical Place	p. 91
John Buchan's Hesperides: The Aesthetics of Improvement on the Highveld	p. 119
Prospect, Materiality, and the Horizons of Potentiality on Parktown Ridge	p. 144
Mrs. Everard's Lonely Career: The Komati Valley and the Depiction of Nostalgic Displacement	p. 178
Color plates follow page 192
Modernity, Memory, and the South African Railways: The Iconography of Emptiness	p. 200
The Life and Afterlife of a Contrapuntal Subjectivity	p. 238
Notes	p. 263
Bibliography	p. 307
Index	p. 327
Table of Contents provided by Blackwell. All Rights Reserved.