"On the brink of the mundane": postapartheid literary representations of Johannesburg in the work of Ivan Vladislavić
Date
2014-06-19
Authors
Mania, Kirby
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Abstract
This thesis adopts a contrapuntal reading of Johannesburg through the work of Ivan
Vladislavić. While it evaluates the dominant and pervasive readings of the city in current
and historical scholarship, carefully considering the way in which its gold-mining origins
have shaped a city that is dominated by a culture of surface, violence, and socio-historical
amnesia, it ultimately aims to show how Vladislavić’s fiction subverts and challenges
these prevailing means of perceiving Johannesburg. As part of inaugurating a depth
reading of the city, Vladislavić sets about defamiliarising both the textual and urban
landscape as a means of engendering a momentary state of lostness. The experience of
lostness means that habitual markers are no longer able to guide or provide comfort to
the textual and urban navigator. As a result, lostness dislodges accustomed ways of
seeing, reading, and writing the city, thus allowing for both textual and urban rediscovery
to ensue. The abandonment of conventions of meaning allows Vladislavić to render the
city afresh. What his depictions reveal are the less commonly noticed aspects of
Johannesburg city-life – in other words, what lies beneath its culture of surface. This
depth reading uncovers a variety of palimpsests of both an urban and natural variety.
Moreover, in this process, nature, something we tend to view as peripheral to the urban
environment, is exposed and shown to exist in the shadows of the postcolonial city –
haunting culture. This revelation ultimately deconstructs Johannesburg’s often paranoid
culture of surface and proffers the ameliorative alternatives of natural flow,
provisionality, and flux.