The urban palimpsest: Re‐presenting Sophiatown

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Abstract
Evoking the notion of urban topography as palimpsest, this article treats urban space as the parchment on which constructions of urban modernity – always already gendered – are inscribed and reinscribed. Focusing on Sophiatown, one of the most symbolically charged and contested urban spaces, and certainly the most iconic urban fiction, it engages with historical processes of erasure in order to explore representations of Sophiatown as an overwritten document whose past topographies linger as traces resistant to effacement, and which, instead, underpin or haunt the imprint of superimposing layers. Taking as my starting point Dorothy Driver’s exploration of the operations of “woman as ‘sign’” in Drum magazine, I extend her reading across various layers of the urban palimpsest as I trace the sedimentation of gender performances in the production of urban modernity, from Alan Paton and the “fabulous fifties” to post‐apartheid returns to and of Sophiatown in Marlene van Niekerk’s novel Triomf (1994) and the films Drum (2004) and Sophiatown: Surviving Apartheid (2003).

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