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This chapter considers the possibilities for public art – whether monumental or ephemeral – to act as a point of access to urban collective memory, and what the politics are of these kinds of public representations and contestations. The politics of public art, public space and the visual languages used to reflect the city’s collective history also play out in relation to colonial statuary, buildings and street names. The city’s histories of dispossession, forced removal and segregation remain etched into its streets and public spaces, as is the case in many South African cities and indeed many colonial cities elsewhere in the world. In 2010, a public green space on a hill in the city centre, the Donkin Memorial, was refurbished by the Mandela Bay Development Agency. Part of this refurbishment was a public art project in which artworks were placed along a winding pathway to the top of the hill, intended to symbolise Mandela’s ‘Long Walk to Freedom’. This triumphant, branding-friendly work is contrasted with the less-visible, often ephemeral methods by which the Black Consciousness activist Steve Biko, who was interrogated by Port Elizabeth security police in the city before his death, is remembered. These figures and biographies point towards the many layers of memory which co-exist in urban public spaces, and the politics of accessing this archive of memory embedded in city streets and squares via the aesthetic realm.

Carrol Clarkson’s chapter wrestles with the contentious question of Coetzee’s relation to the Black Consciousness Movement in South Africa of the 1970s and early 1980s, which took its philosophical bearings from Frantz Fanon and found expression in the writings of Steve Biko. Clarkson focuses on the ways in which Coetzee departed from the ideas about writing and resistance that were circulating in his contemporary South Africa, particularly as articulated by novelist Nadine Gordimer. Clarkson discusses two related literary-critical problems: an ethics and politics of representation, and an ethics and politics of address, showing how Coetzee explores a tension between freedom of expression and responsibility to the other. In the slippage from saying to addressing we are led to further thought about modes and sites of consciousness—and hence accountabilities—in the interlocutory contact zones of the post-colony. The chapter invites a sharper appreciation of what a postcolonial philosophy might be.

Born at the turn of the twentieth century in Jim Crow Arkansas, Lee Bradley experienced the hardships of growing up black in the Mississippi and Arkansas River deltas. Introduced to music at a young age, Bradley developed an unusual talent as a country fiddler. Over time, he gained enough renown that his musicianship offered opportunities for work outside of his poor, sharecropping community. Just as he began cultivating his own sense of local music celebrity, he was pulled into the United States Army as a member of the American Expeditionary Force in World War I. His experiences abroad as a solider had an enormous impact on his understanding of the South, Jim Crow, and his own plight upon his return.