This article tries to look beyond what I call the spatial forgeries of racial capitalism in early 20th century Durban, South Africa, a set of renditions of the ocean and the city, to make sense of quite a surprising and relatively unremarked set of events. In a period of racial and xenophobic vitriol, Black subalterns from the Indian Ocean who had lived through harsh periods of indentured labour slowly and concertedly transformed the urban periphery and interstices. I trace three moves through which Indian indentured labour was ‘shoaled’ on South Africa’s racial shores, the way mixed Black populations in the urban periphery and interstices ‘built’ marginal and interstitial infrastructure to support their communal survival, and the way they literally ‘rooted’ themselves in place in ways that make Durban distinctive as an 'Indian' city on African shores, in partial complicity with a deepening landscape of racial segregation. What is clear is that these forms of spatial praxis accomplished nothing less than the decisive dissolution of the fantasy of a white city by the Afro-Indian sea. The complexities of this account also offer a cautionary tale with respect to our own desires for spacetimes of marronage to prove ‘successful’.

本文试图超越我所说的 20 世纪早期南非德班种族资本主义的空间伪造，一组海洋和城市的再现，以理解一组相当令人惊讶且相对不引人注目的事件。在种族歧视和仇外讽刺的时代，来自印度洋的黑人基层经历了艰苦的契约劳动时期，缓慢而协调地改变了城市边缘和空隙。我追溯了印度契约劳工在南非种族海岸“浅滩”的三个举措，城市边缘黑人人口混合的方式和空隙“建造”边缘和间隙基础设施以支持他们的社区生存，以及他们真正“扎根”的方式' 使德班成为“印度人”的独特方式 非洲海岸上的城市，部分与不断加深的种族隔离景观共谋。显而易见的是，这些形式的空间实践无非是决定性地瓦解了非洲-印度海沿岸白色城市的幻想。这个帐户的复杂性也提供了一个关于我们自己渴望证明“成功”的婚姻时空的警示故事。