Managing colonial alterity: narratives of race, space and labor in Durban, 1870–1920

After being annexed by the British in 1844, the colony of Natal was administered through the mechanisms of indirect rule, which created a division between the subjects and spaces of a modern, urban European domain and a ‘primitive’, rural African realm. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, this implied spatial division began to dissolve as a growing economy drew large numbers of Indian and African workers into the colony's cities. This paper examines the impacts of these changes in the city of Durban, through a reading of European public sentiments about the presence of these ‘others’ within the city. Laboring bodies became sites of public anxiety about the potential ‘contamination’ of the social order, and this led to increasing attempts to identify and contain these bodies through new forms of juridical and administrative control. These policies served to redraw the spatial boundaries of subjectivity around race as the privileged category determining rights and residence within the city, and in this way Durban's urban history serves as an exemplar of a more pervasive socio-spatial epistemology of race and whiteness.