Topic
Walking Home: Mobility and Home-City Geographies in Johannesburg City Literature
The proposed paper approaches representations of an urbanity in crises in Johannesburg city literature through a combination of literary geography, urban and mobility studies to explore how a racially fragmented city can be claimed as home. Methodologically, the paper will combine a close reading analysis that focuses on the construction of literary distances (Ameel), with visualisations of embodied mobilities in the form of maps inspired by Guy Debord’s psychogeographic cartography. The aim is to explore how the right to the city as home (Lefebvre) can be realised in a highly fragmented, yet fast changing city, such as Johannesburg (Samuelson). For that purpose, different periods of urbanisation in South Africa are compared to explore dis/continuities in claiming the city as home. The pre- and post-apartheid periods stand out in that they share similarities in their literary themes, spatial topoi, openness regarding directionality, and forms of embodied mobilities in the negotiation of a right to the city.
From the comparison emerges further, walking as an everyday practice that aids an alternative mapping of the city thus constituting an act of resistance (de Certeau). The transgressive character of walking, in these narratives, derives from the intimacy the practice creates between people (Pearce) as well as people and different urban topoi. These intimate connections form networks that ultimately develop into a home-city geography (Blunt and Sheringham) that expands the sense of belonging from an individual dwelling into the streets and beyond. Johannesburg emerges as home at the intersection of the collective and individual which is reflected in the collapse of different geographical scales and simultaneous existence of different temporalities that characterise the post/colonial urban home.
Corpus
- An African Tragedy (R.R.R. Dhlomo 1928),
- ‘An Experiment in Colour’ (H.I.E. Dhlomo 1935),
- Mine Boy (Abrahams 1946),
- Cry, the Beloved Country (Paton 1948),
- Welcome to Our Hillbrow (Mpe 2001),
- Portrait with Key (Vladislavić 2006),
- The Madams (Wanner 2006),
- Zoo City (Beukes 2010)
S. U. Kriegel (Freie Universität Berlin)
S. U. Kriegel is a visiting lecturer at different departments of English Studies in Germany. She has taught a variety of classes on anglophone and South African culture, media, and the history of the British Empire and has published on mobility in South African fiction. Other research interests include petromasculinity, gendered spaces, and postcolonial mobilities.