Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis

a Public Culture Book

by Sarah Nuttall (Editor), Stefan Helgesson (Contributor), Lindsay Bremner (Contributor)

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

Genres: South Africa, Nonfiction

392 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.