Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis

a Public Culture Book

by Sarah Nuttall, Achille Mbembe

This issue of Public Culture attempts to overturn perceptions that frame Africa as an object apart from the rest of the world. By placing the city of Johannesburg—the preeminent metropolis of the African continent and a city facing a complicated legacy of racial strife and wealth accumulation—at the heart of new critical urban theory, The Elusive Metropolis broadens discussions of modernity, cosmopolitanism, and urban renewal to include Africa. The issue brings Johannesburg into direct dialogue with other world cities, creating a space for the interrogation and investigation of the metropolis in a properly global sense. Contributors to this issue—a mix of scholars, urban planners, and artists, many of whom hail from South Africa—reveal Johannesburg to be a polycentric and international city that has developed its own cosmopolitan culture. In a detailed study of three streets in the modern precinct of Melrose Arch, one essay shows how the thoroughly commodified and marketed Johannesburg cityscape has shaped the cultural sensitivities, aesthetics, and urban subjectivities of its inhabitants, at times even overriding the historical memory of apartheid. Another essay, focusing on the emergence of a new urban culture, examines how the city itself becomes a crucial site for the remixing and reassembling of racial identities. By tracking the movement of people with AIDS to various locations in the city to seek relief and treatment, another essay reveals an urban geography very different from what is seen from the highways. Finally, through interviews and commentaries, journalists, artists, and architects of Johannesburg offer reflections on the geography and shifting culture of the city and its townships, on the complicated relationship between Johannesburg and other African cities, and on the search for an architectural style that adequately expresses the complexity of this cosmopolitan city. Contributors. Lindsay Bremner, Nsizwa Dlamini, Mark Gevisser, Grace Khunou, Frédéric Le Marcis, John Matshikiza, Achille Mbembe, Sarah Nuttall, Rodney Place, AbdouMaliq Simone, Michael Watts

Genres: South Africa, Nonfiction

220 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2004

Reviews

[Shoshone · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful excerpt from the afterword, by Appadurai and Breckenridge:


[This book] takes a risk [which] is at the heart of the debate between the editors and geographer Michael Watts...Does this project somehow evade, elude, or cheat the real of money and power, of inequality and suffering? Does it somehow forsake the obligation we all have to that Africa which fills the bottom ranks of the Human Development Report? We are not about to referee the passionate exchange of voices in this debate. Suffice it to say that [this book] is filled with instances that show how an aesthetics of the everyday is fully compatible with life on the margins, life under severe uncertainty, and life as a terrain of danger and suffering. There is a subtler issue here, of course, than the tired debates between "culture" and "political economy" or even between critique and curiosity or between seeing like a state and staring like a fool. The issue is whether Africa can be asked any more to defer its encounter with beauty, desire, commodities, and style, while the world decides how to forgive its debt or witness the truth of its reconciliations.

The editors and contributors to this book have a position on this debate and it is clear. We will not wait, they argue, and we cannot afford to wait, to defer the writing of Africa until that day (perhaps some sort of Day of Judgment from the Hague, Geneva, or Davos), when the world shall declare that Africa has now officially been allowed the privilege of having an everyday, of having an urban life, of having lives worth studying and styles worth emulating. Presumably that declaration will come when Africa becomes our New Jerusalem, free of warfare, ethnic violence, debt, misery, and forced migration. We understand...why such patience is misplaced. For it requires that Africa bear the special burden of solving the problems of the world. Jesus may have died for our sins, but we cannot ask Africa to do the same.

[Sandra · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've been looking for something contemporary on Johannesburg -- and along come Sarah. Nuttall and Achille Mbembe with their lovingly curated collection of vivid, wrenching, academic and gloriously detailed essays.
Essays: on art, architecture, infrastructure, township, African immigrants. The issues of race are, as always, cheek by jowl with the issues of economics.
What you might expect: restaurant reviews, home-grown fashions, inner-city struggles, Nigerian drug organizations, re-definition of the black/white issues, and AIDS. All of these were riveting, informative and engaging reading.
There's also the unexpected: markets remain as centers for passing on or retrieving information, the stigma of being in hospice, how to play the post-apartheid system, and a rapturous celebration of "Sounds in the City".
This was one of my favorite essays. Xavier Livermon takes the reader on a sound-tour of the city. The honking of cars, the clap of thunder, shoes clicking on pavement, and music. He describes the influence of "kwaito", street slang incorporated by rappers in their various vernaculars.
Another favorite is "Nocturnal Johannesburg" by Julia Hornberger whose description of the street lighting differences between the wealthy areas in Johnannesburg and Soweto reminded me of flying over the Texas/Mexico border. On the Texas side the lights were bright, white. On the Mexico side they were dull blue.
And as a final note, I loved the description of the "pantsula" dancing. I checked it on YouTube. Those guys can move.