Civilising grass
the art of the lawn in the South African Highveld
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Johannesburg
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Civilising Grass is a socio-cultural analysis of the lawn on the South African highveld, exploring the complex relationship between landscape and power in the country’s colonial, modernist and post-apartheid eras. Drawing from eco-criticism, queer theory, art history and postcolonial studies, this book offers a lively and provocative reading of texts and illustrations to reveal the racial and gendered aspects of ‘natural’ environments. It argues that the lawn, an ordinary and often overlooked feature of South African everyday life, is neither natural nor innocent. Rather, like other colonial landscapes, the lawn functions as a site of commonplace violence, of oppression, dispossession and segregation. This book explores an eclectic archive of artistic, literary and architectural lawns between 1886 and 2017, analysing poems, maps, gardening blogs, adverts, ethnographies and ephemera, as well as literature by Koos Prinsloo, Marlene van Niekerk and Ivan Vladislavic.
