The Amlay House, the Fietas Museum, and the Sophiatown Museum are easily overshadowed by the larger and more trafficked heritage sites in South Africa. However, these three small museums matter – and not only because they host exhibitions about the traumatic legacies of apartheid-era forced removals. They matter equally because of what they do not contain. This talk will highlight the politics of refusal that shape the museums’ collections: from a secret deposit of artifacts guarded from the museums by a homeless community, to excavated bottles and family photographs withheld from donation to the museums, these gaps in the collection histories illuminate community relationships that are typically excluded from museum ethnographies. As a departure from conventional approaches to the study of museums, this talk will instead center what performance theorist Peggy Phelan calls the “unmarked” presences that give rise to the museum itself.

Jasmine Reid is a PhD Candidate in anthropology. Her research marries heritage management, museology, and post-colonial studies to explore the ways in which a small network of museums in Johannesburg, South Africa narrativizes the history and legacy of forcibly removed, multiracial communities under apartheid. Beginning in the early 1950s, the apartheid government launched a decades-long campaign to destroy mixed-race communities and overlay the forcibly vacated lands with white-only neighborhoods, and she is interested in how institutions founded to commemorate the displaced communities engage with the lived experiences of those who currently reside on these contested lands. More specifically, her research hinges on the question of how the tangible land and the intangible notion of home are invoked during these community interactions.

Prior to coming to Stanford, she completed her BA in Anthropology and African Studies at Yale University. After college, she worked for nine months in a South African museum, where she co-curated several exhibitions and produced a film to highlight the ways in which a local Catholic church advocated for its black and coloured parishioners in the face of forced removal. She, then spent two years working in Washington, DC as an outreach coordinator for a local non-profit.