1. Providing local color?: "cape coloreds," "cockneys," and Cape Town's identity from the late nineteenth century to the 1970s.
- Author
-
Bickford-Smith V
- Subjects
- Cities economics, Cities ethnology, Cities history, History, 19th Century, History, 20th Century, Humans, South Africa ethnology, United Kingdom ethnology, Urban Health ethnology, Urban Health history, Cultural Diversity, Population Groups education, Population Groups ethnology, Population Groups history, Population Groups legislation & jurisprudence, Population Groups psychology, Prejudice, Race Relations history, Race Relations legislation & jurisprudence, Race Relations psychology, Social Identification, Stereotyping, Urban Population history
- Abstract
Jim Dyos, founding-father of British urban history, argued that cities have commonly acknowledged “individual characteristics” that distinguish them. Such distinctive characteristics, though usually based on material realities, are promoted through literary and visual representations. This article argues that those who seek to convey a city’s distinctiveness will do so not only through describing its particular topography, architecture, history or functions but also by describing its “local colour”: the supposedly unique customs, manner of speech, dress, or other special features of its inhabitants. In colonial cities this process involved white racial stereotyping of “others”. In Cape Town, depictions of “Coloured” inhabitants as unique “city types” became part of the city’s “destination branding”. The article analyses change and continuity in such representations. To this end it draws on the insights of Gareth Stedman Jones into changing depictions of London’s “Cockneys” and the insights of Stephen Ward into historical “place-selling”.
- Published
- 2012
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