Paper short abstract:

Provoked by 'Awakening social sessions' collective in Kimberley, South Africa, who host spiritual, creative interventions across a historical, highly segregated mining town, 'Plasticity in the city' offers a mesopolitical scale for researching embodied postcolonial and post-Apartheid urban life.

Paper long abstract:

“These is something wrong with celebrating a space where so many people have died” Tshepo, organizer of ‘Awakening social sessions’, says about the ‘Big Hole’ mining complex tourism centre at the heart of the diamond rush city of Kimberley, South Africa. He says the ‘Big Hole’ “sucks all our energy”. Tshepo and his team organize music, arts, and spiritual social events for Kimberley youth, in a set of strategic spatial moves that defy the inequitable material and spatial distribution across the city. They aim to build solidarity and care for present and future generations, and to appease the anger of ancestors who endured mass burial in the mines, inhumane labour conditions, land theft, invasion, and with Apartheid, eugenicist classification and segregation. This paper reads their interventions across epigenetic and Southern urban studies. Plasticity signals both a techno-scientific post-genomic research buzzword that de-centres the gene and demonstrates embodied change via environmental ‘signals’ , and centuries’ old human-environment imbrication. The city is site of interwoven socio-political, ancestral and imagined future life. It is and can be productively theorized from the South (Roy 2009, Robinson 2006, Bhan 2019) – and specifically, from the spiritual and creatively facilitated 'Awakening social session's rather than the cavity of the ‘Big Hole’. Plasticity in the city offers a mesopolitical scale for understanding and better imagining of postcolonial and post-Apartheid collective life.