Revisiting Grey Street: The Grey Street Writers Trail in the Context of Urban Regeneration

This paper emerges from joint research by scholars in South Africa and Germany on a literary trail devised in 2006 by the research project KwaZulu-Natal Literary Tourism. This urban trail, set in a historically Indian-occupied area of Durban, highlights writers who lived in and wrote about it. Coinciding with the tenth anniversary of the Grey Street Writers’ Trail in 2015, the literary trail was the focus of an MA dissertation by Bettina Pahlen on the relationship between the literature trail and ongoing urban renewal activity in the quarter.The research suggests that the Grey Street Writers trail represents a narrative of what trail designers, guides and authors consider meaningful about a place. Participant's engagement with this trail narrative shows its potential to change the perception of the area under regeneration. Informed by the work of Michel de Certeau (walking the city), Hubert Zapf (literature as cultural ecology), Throgmorton (storytelling in urban planning) and Edward Relph (placemaking, sense of place), this paper investigates factors limiting the trail’s contribution to urban regeneration in the Casbah. The questions asked by this paper is first, how the literary trail draws on and is impacted by experiences of urban renewal, and secondly, how the influence of the literary trail narrative on trail participants is limited by design and modified during implementation

Hitting the Hot Spots: Literary Tourism as a Research Field with Particular Reference to KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa

Literary tourism is a new field in the province of KwaZulu-Natal, and South Africa more generally. Whilst in England, the interested reader/traveller can buy books on Hardy's Wessex, Dickens's London and Shakespeare's Stratford-on-Avon; show literature students and the public generally an assortment of films on places associated with important writers, and even go on guided walks through famous ‘literary' places like Wordsworth's Lake District; there is very little of the same for the South African literature researcher–or indeed literary fan. KwaZulu-Natal is a particularly rich province culturally speaking, offering a wide range of writers both black and white, male and female, writing in English and Zulu predominantly–Alan Paton, Roy Campbell, Lewis Nkosi, Lauretta Ngcobo, Daphne Rooke to mention but a few. Efforts by literary scholars to encourage literary tourism in this fertile area inevitably lead one to consider a research agenda; in my case this has a threefold purpose involving firstly, the creation of a literary archive of local writers both past and present; secondly, the recording of selected writers and their works on film, and thirdly, the establishment of a ‘literary map' of the region on website. Such a research agenda carries with it complex questions: how to define a ‘local' writer? How to understand the uses a writer makes of place? Who should be featured and why? How do readers' constructed places interface with ‘real' places? What could the impact of literary tourism be? This paper engages with some of these questions and attempts to suggest a possible research agenda that has exciting possibilities within KwaZulu-Natal, and which could offer a potential framework for similar literary tourism projects in other provinces of South Africa in the future. Critical Arts Vol.18(2) 2004: 31-4