“That’s my locie!”Narratives of place in Salt River through the lens of drinking

establishments

Alcohol Cape Town

Evan BlakeMSocSc Candidate

African Centre for CitiesUniversity of Cape Town

Outline

1. Geographies of alcohol literature focusing on place

2. Salt River as a place: context, The Local and The Immigrant

3. South African ‘Cityness’ literature

4. Reading the locie: Familiar place into foreign space and The locie place

5. Reflections: Bastion of memory

1. Space and place in geographis of drinking

• Literature exploring place and meaning making in geographies of alcohol – very situated literature

• Jayne, Valentine and Holloway’s call to geographers – writing the place of drinking geographies across the world – what may very localised drinking in different places look like? What does this speak to at broader scales?

• Using other literatures to contextualise place making and drinking to South African contexts?

2. Establishing place: Salt River

The ‘Local’ and the ‘Locie’

Salt River: water colour by Tony Grogan

The immigrant

• Unique cultures emerging from SR spaces from these groups

• Drinking places with a sense of community, spaces are varied in nature

• Form ‘the other’ as seen by ‘the locals’

3. Reflecting back on alc geog lit

• Narrative and imagination as important place making processes in the context of Salt River’s drinking estb.

• Very contextual drinking places emerging: e.g. The Locie

• ‘Placeness’ is present in literature geographies of alcohol and place however contexts are very different

• Need for a theoretical underpinning to contextualise places like those in Salt River

A theory of ‘Cityness’

“ ‘Citiness’ we understood as made up of excess, simultaneity, speed, appearance, rapid

alternations, relentless change, and indeed ceaseless mutability and discontinuous eventfulness:

transience. An analysis based on political economy alone can hardly account for the changing

inventory and the rich textuality of Johannesburg’s citiness, its unsettled appearances, and its

restlessness: the simultaneity of order, disruption, and abrupt interruptions; the incessant labor of

framing, reframing, and unframing; of destroying, renovating, and reconstructing; of juxtaposing

and segregating; of reiterating and deleting; of triviality, vulgarity, and refinement; of shock,

ephemerality, and enchantment.”

Mbembe and Nuttall: Writing the World From An African Metropolis, 2004

4. Reading the locie

Familiar place into foreign ‘other’ space• Familiar places of family, friends and the past – now

places for immigrants

• Not understood as places by ‘the locals’: foreign space, space of the unfamiliar and dangerous

• Place of past and present

• Place of collected memory

• Community as a central component to the place

• Claims to this sense of community and place

• Community for who?

The ‘locie’ place

5. Bastion of Memory