The third period (post-1983) was after District Six was cleared, renamed, and reserved for whites, an era where coloured literature turned toward communal nostalgia in the form of romanticized autobiography. Literature of this era is typified by the minute detailing of District Six's material conditions, or what we can call “portrait protest.” The second period (1966-1982) relates to the protracted demolition of the area, in which coloured writing focused on individuals’ psychic and relational trauma which the Group Areas Act effected. The first period (pre-1966) was a time when the community lived under the threat, but not the actuality, of relocation. I propose that there are three discrete periods, each related to the status of the district’s integrity, which directly inform the production of coloured literature. In this thesis, I trace the genealogy of literature produced from the 1960s to the 1990s, showing that District Six exercised an important function in the mobilization of resistance to apartheid and the imagination of new forms of communal cohesion and memory. As many of them hailed from D6 themselves - and were victims of the Group Areas forced removals - they registered their protest to the brutalities of white rule by writing stories about the impact it had on residents of the District. The destruction of District Six in Cape Town was a seminal event for coloured South African writers during apartheid.
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