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VICTORIANS LIVE: Images of Empire: Art and Artifacts in Cape Town, South Africa

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 March 2006

Carole G. Silver
Carole G. Silver
Affiliation:
Yeshiva University
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Extract

CAPE TOWN, SOUTH AFRICA–eclectic, vibrant, and heterogeneous–still bears the marks of its past as a site of Victoria's empire. The city abounds in English Victorian artifacts: buildings, statues, fountains, streets and their names (even to Victoria Street and Rhodes Drive) are all reminders of the period, but one wonders what, if anything, they mean to the people who live with them. Some recognize them as a legacy–pleasant or unpleasant– of the days when the Cape was a British colony; to others they are symbols whose context has been forgotten, to yet others, they are simply objects devoid of extrinsic meaning. All are, however, artifacts of imperialism, in its broader sense of the social, political, economic, and cultural domination of one group over all others.

Type
REVIEW ESSAY
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 34 , Issue 1 , March 2006 , pp. 335 - 342
Copyright
© 2006 Cambridge University Press

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References

Hall Martin. 1992. “People in a Changing Urban Landscape: Excavating Cape Town.” Inaugural Lecture, March 25,
Tietze Anna. 1995. The Alfred de Pass Presentation to the South African National Gallery. London: Phillips