Towards redress: The ‘not-yet’ future between harm and repair in Cape Town

Abstract

ImaginingOtherwise was a participatory arts education initiative engaging peripheralised young people to explore how ‘race’ and space are reproduced in the specific context of the Cape Flats, Cape Town, which like all apartheid cities, was a result of violent dispossession by forced removals. There is a need to attend to local, specific accounts of young people and their capacity to resist the ravages of disposability. I bring together youth studies, futures studies and some insights from ImaginingOtherwise, considering processes of listening and participating in gathering, stories of ‘race’, space and dispossession and how these may lead towards imagining other outcomes. What does ‘imagining otherwise’ enable in the afterlives of injustice? Witnessing and truth-telling alone do not equate to reconciliation and we need something in between. I thus take up Olùfémi O. Táíwò’s discussions of reparations (2021), developing a counter-position that attests to Saidiya Hartman’s concept of ‘redress’ (1997). Emphasising the centrality of redress as a worldmaking, future-oriented mode, I argue that in this local and contextually defined project, collective imagining became a ‘doing’ of just futures in the present, and as such, enabled a rehearsal of possible futures between harm and repair. A redressive orientation to futures is not a chronologically linear journey, but one that moves between temporalities. The article proposes that redress is a grounded and collaborative approach that unfolds outside of formal (legalistic, logistical, monetised or material) reparations. Redress is a worldmaking, future-oriented mode and we need creative and collaborative pedagogies to work through the need to break and ‘unmake’ towards a different future.