CIVILISING GRASS, the art of the lawn on the South African Highveld

233pp., b/w & colour illus., paperback, Johannesburg, 2019.

"This lively, witty text explores the history and meaning of the lawn, social and cultural expressions of land ownership, and such value-laden notions as race and respectability." Ivan Vladislavic, author of The Distance and Double Negative

"An audacious account of the 'banal brutality' of colonial and apartheid lawn subjects and subjectivities in South Africa. Writing against the lawn's archival grain of heteropatriarchy, the author reveals multiple visual and textual landscapes of power, labour, and longings for green." Pamila Gupta, Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER) and author of Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean World

Jonathan Cane is an art historian at the University of the Witwatersrand.