Excavating the Legal Subject

Abstract

In mid-2003, an extensive slave burial ground was discovered close to Cape Town’s central business district. Named ‘Prestwich Place’ by activists for its memorialisation, the site rapidly became the focus of a debate which highlighted tensions around identity and postcolonial memory in this part of South Africa. Prestwich Place and other contentious urban heritage sites in the city are elements of a cartography of silences and hauntings of the postcolonial archive. This article begins to read the relationship between these hauntings, ethical and juridical discourses of public memory in contemporary South Africa, and the possibilities available to law for remembering and mourning the dead.