Johannesburg , livre ebook
408
pages
English
Ebooks
2008
Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne En savoir plus
Découvre YouScribe en t'inscrivant gratuitement
Découvre YouScribe en t'inscrivant gratuitement
408
pages
English
Ebook
2008
Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne En savoir plus
Publié par
Date de parution
24 octobre 2008
Nombre de lectures
0
EAN13
9780822381211
Langue
English
Poids de l'ouvrage
3 Mo
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, Frederic Le Marcis, Xavier Livermon, John Matshikiza, Achille Mbembe, Robert Muponde, Sarah Nuttall, Tom Odhiambo, Achal Prabhala, AbdouMaliq Simone
Voir
Publié par
Date de parution
24 octobre 2008
Nombre de lectures
0
EAN13
9780822381211
Langue
English
Poids de l'ouvrage
3 Mo
Johannesburg
aPublic Culturebook
Johannesburg
The Elusive Metropolis
Edited by sar ah nut tall and achille mbembe With an afterword by Arjun Appadurai and Carol A. Breckenridge
Duke University Press Durham and London2008
©sssityivperreeunduk0280 All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acidfree paper¥ Designed by C. H. Westmoreland Typeset in Minion by Achorn International, Inc.
Library of Congress CataloginginPublication Data Johannesburg : the elusive metropolis / Sarah Nuttall and Achille Mbembe, eds. ; with an afterword by Arjun Appadurai and Carol A. Breckenridge. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn9780822342625(cloth : alk. paper) — isbn9780822342847(pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Johannesburg (South Africa)—Social conditions. 2. Johannesburg (South Africa)—Civilization.3. Sociology, Urban—South Africa—Johannesburg. I. Nuttall, Sarah. II. Mbembé, J.A.,1957– hn801.028064j4j6 306.096822’1—dc222008019636
Contents
acknowledgmentsvii Introduction: Afropolisachillembembeandsarahnuttall 1
1.Aesthetics of Superfluity7emb3lielmebahc 2.People as Infrastructureaamildbuomoneqsi68 3.Stylizing the Selflal91sattnuhra 4.Gandhi, Mandela, and the African Modernjonathanhyslop119 5.Art Johannesburg and Its Objectsnndubadiv137 6.The Suffering Body of the Cityics1celmrafrdri07 7.Literary Cityarstautnah91ll5
Voice Lines Instant Cityizika212ojmnhhsta Soweto Nowachillembembe,nsizwadlamini, andgracekhunou 2 39 The Arrivants284eoberndrpondtmuotdommaihaob Johannesburg, Metropolis of Mozambiquen259ehglseossetafn Sounds in the Cityonrmrievelivax721 Nocturnal Johannesburgjuli528regrebnroha Megamalls, Generic City7refeddirvse92 Yeoville Confidentiallahaab730caahlrp
From the Ruins317mrakegivssre Reframing Township Spacelisandbryneem373r
Afterword: The Risk of Johannesburgarjunappadurai andcarola.breckenridge351
bibliography3 55 contributors375 additionalillustrationcredits379 index381
Acknowledgments
In the early1990s, Carol Breckenridge, then editor ofPublic Culture, sug gested that the journal run a special issue on Africa. When we were asked to edit it, it quickly became clear to us that producing such an issue with out a profound reinterrogation of Africa as a sign in modern formations of knowledge would have little value, both forPublic Culture’s readers and for us as editors. Instead, we thought that what was needed was a gestureof defamiliarization capable of providing the reader with a sense of the worldliness of contemporary African life forms. To undertake this gesture of defamiliarization, there was no better scene or site than a late modern African metropolis. We believed that a critical rereading of Johannesburg could help to shift, if only partially, the center of gravity of traditional forms of analysis and interpretations of Africa in global scholarship. We also hoped to show that when it comes to “things African,” it is possible to move away from the fascination with the horrors of a seemingly static world and to rehabilitate our curiosity while also insisting on this virtue as a necessary hallmark of a truly global academic project.
Beth Povinelli and Dilip Gaonkar not only vigorously endorsed the project but also helped in shaping it intellectually. In particular, discussions with Beth Povinelli in Johannesburg and New York enriched the overall rationale of what has now come to be a fulllength book. To the original articles pub lished inPublic Culturehave been added new contributions and an afterword by Arjun Appadurai and Carol Breckenridge.Public Culture’s editorial com mittee provided challenging comments on and criticisms about the original
essays, to which we have now added previously unpublished chapters. Kaylin Goldstein was a superb interlocutor and manager of the production process. Ken Wissoker at Duke University Press has been a pleasure to work with and an extremely valuable commentator on the manuscript. The Witwatersrand Institute for Social and Economic Research (wiser) has been an extraordi narily conducive environment from which to produce this book. We owe a great intellectual debt to all of our colleagues, specifically Deborah Posel, Jon Hyslop, Liz Walker, Ivor Chipkin, Graeme Reid, Irma Du Plessis, Tom Odhi ambo, and Robert Muponde. We would also like to thank Arjun Appadurai, Carol Breckenridge, Paul Gilroy, Dominique Malaquais, Vyjayanthi Rao, and Vron Ware for their intellectual companionship during a semester spent at Yale University. Isabel Hofmeyr, Jon Hyslop, and Lindsay Bremner all com mented on the introduction. David Goldberg read the entire manuscript, and we are enormously indebted to him. Part of the funding for the research and images in this book has come from a grant fromaireDéveloppement, a program of the French Institute for Research in Development, based in Paris. William Kentridge generously granted permission for the reproduc tion of some of his Johannesburg drawings, which add immeasurably to the visual life of the book.
viiiacknowledgments
There is a manner aboutJohannesburg, it makes the impression of a metropolis. . ,The South Africans
Introduction: Afropolis
achille mbembe and sar ah nut tall
Johannesburg is the premier African metropolis, the symbol par excellence ofthe “African modern.” It has been, over the last hundred years, along with SãoPaulo, Mumbai, Kuala Lumpur, Shanghai, Seoul, and Sydney, one of the criti cal nodes of Southern Hemispheric capitalism and globalization. The African modern is a specific way of being in the world. As elsewhere in the global South, it has been shaped in the crucible of colonialism and by the labor of race. Worldliness, in this context, has had to do not only with the capacity to generate one’s own cultural forms, institutions, and lifeways, but also with theability to foreground, translate, fragment, and disrupt realities and imaginariesoriginating elsewhere, and in the process place these forms and processes in the service of one’s own making. This is why modernity and worldliness, here, have been so intrinsically connected to various forms of circulation—of peo ple, capital, finance, and images—and to overlapping spaces and times. This book is therefore, above all, an exercise in writing the worldliness of a con temporary African city. To write an African metropolis into the world is a com plex and compelling task. On the one hand, it requires a profound reinterrogation of Africa in general as a sign in modern formations of knowledge. On the other hand, it calls for a critical examination of some of the ways in which cities in gen eral and African cities in particular have been read in recent global scholarship. Over the last quarter of the twentieth century, the paradigm of “the global city” has dominated the study of the urban form. It has also been one of the cornerstones of studies of globalization. The starting point of the global city
© 2010-2024 YouScribe
