ABSTRACT
Inter-oceanic journeys dramatically influenced notions of the new. One trajectory of modern shock lies in a sensibility borne of the sea. Sites of former colonial pillage embody the visceral signs of modernity, residues of travels across oceans. True Civilizations are poetic shocks: the shock of the stars, of the sun, the plant, the animal, the shock of the round globe, of the rain, of the light, of numbers, the shock of life, and the shock of death. Shock is the shaping aesthetic of the Malabar region. From locale to locale the sites of passage, of colonial violence and epistemological shifts mark the landscape. The delirious feeling of standing at a nerve point of the world’s greatest involuntarily nomadic journey, the slave trade routes, is concretized high up on a hill in the Bo Kaap district of Cape Town. Amidst grass, shrubs and dry brush, lies an ancient cemetery.
