Writing from the Cape Town Shoreline: Carnival and Syncopated Futures

This paper thinks through a comparison of the Cape Town Carnival and Tweede Nuwe Jaar carnival in Cape Town to illustrate tensions around how disciplines like archaeology (re)inscribe the past in the present. In combining my ethnographic research and other artistic interventions, I conceptualise performed sound as an alternative articulation of space and time. Each carnival enacts dissonant formations of identity. The tensions between these formations resonate with broader unresolved, and perhaps unresolvable, hauntings of coloniality in Atlantic and Indian Oceanic relations. To contend with this unresolveability, the paper employs the concepts of spectrality and ‘the underneath’, as a way of reconfiguring the layers of meaning buried below the city which these performative traditions traverse. Here, the sonic offers disjunction as a way of writing urban temporality differently. As a perspective that envelops these forms of spectrality and temporality, writing from the shoreline is a practice that resists absolutes and is charged with insurgent potential to imagine a future from the hauntings. At stake is the recognition of (im)material forces which mediate epistemic reconciliation and material restitution.