Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis

Description

Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis is a pioneering effort to insert South Africa’s largest city into urban theory, on its own terms. Johannesburg is Africa’s premier metropolis. Yet theories of urbanization have cast it as an emblem of irresolvable crisis, the spatial embodiment of unequal economic relations and segregationist policies, and a city that responds to but does not contribute to modernity on the global scale. Complicating and contesting such characterizations, the contributors to this collection reassess classic theories of metropolitan modernity as they explore the experience of “city-ness” and urban life in post-apartheid South Africa. They portray Johannesburg as a polycentric and international city with a hybrid history that continually permeates the present. Turning its back on rigid rationalities of planning and racial separation, Johannesburg has become a place of intermingling and improvisation, a city that is fast developing its own brand of cosmopolitan culture. The volume’s essays include an investigation of representation and self-stylization in the city, an ethnographic examination of friction zones and practices of social reproduction in inner-city Johannesburg, and a discussion of the economic and literary relationship between Johannesburg and Maputo, Mozambique’s capital. One contributor considers how Johannesburg’s cosmopolitan sociability enabled the anticolonial projects of Mohandas Ghandi and Nelson Mandela. Journalists, artists, architects, writers, and scholars bring contemporary Johannesburg to life in ten short pieces, including reflections on music and megamalls, nightlife, built spaces, and life for foreigners in the city. Contributors: Arjun Appadurai, Carol A. Breckenridge, Lindsay Bremner, David Bunn, Fred de Vries, Nsizwa Dlamini, Mark Gevisser, Stefan Helgesson, Julia Hornberger, Jonathan Hyslop, Grace Khunou, Frédéric Le Marcis, Xavier Livermon, John Matshikiza, Achille Mbembe, Robert Muponde, Sarah Nuttall, Tom Odhiambo, Achal Prabhala, AbdouMaliq Simone Contents......Page 6 Acknowledgments......Page 8 Introduction: Afropolis......Page 10 1. Aesthetics of Superfluity......Page 46 2. People as Infrastructure......Page 77 3. Stylizing the Self......Page 100 4. Gandhi, Mandela, and the African Modern......Page 128 5. Art Johannesburg and Its Objects......Page 146 6. The Suffering Body of the City......Page 179 7. Literary City......Page 204 Voice Lines......Page 228 Instant City......Page 230 Soweto Now......Page 248 The Arrivants......Page 257 Johannesburg......Page 268 Sounds in the City......Page 280 Nocturnal Johannesburg......Page 294 Megamalls, Generic City......Page 306 Yeoville Confidential......Page 316 From the Ruins......Page 326 Reframing Township Space......Page 346 Afterword: The Risk of Johannesburg......Page 360 Bibliography......Page 364 Contributors......Page 384 Additional Illustration Credits......Page 388 Index......Page 390