ABSTRACT
This chapter explores and questions the potential role that the literary texts can play in responding to the archival silences of subaltern architectural and urban histories. This is done through a reading across the urban and architectural history of Cape Town, South Africa, and literature, with a particular focus on the novel Unconfessed (2006) by Yvette Christiansë. Cape Town is well known for its Cape Dutch architecture: gabled homesteads which were seen as emblematic of civilisation in Africa. Yet largely absent from architectural accounts are the subaltern and slave histories of these sites. The novel, Unconfessed, draws on court records of a slave woman in Cape Town, and yet imaginatively and critically reconstitutes the spatial and material histories of slaves and ‘Blackness’ in Cape Town through narrative techniques. Christiansë’s writing draws out the spaces of the doubly erased bodies of unseen ‘Black’ women. Drawing on postcolonial literature, and through a reading across literary works and architectural history, this paper contributes to debates on the relevance and importance of literary works to architectural and urban studies.
