relation to studies of class in South Africa emphasis has been oriented towards the working class, while fewer studies have focused on peasant or rural culture or, one might add, on middle-class migrant and city cultures.6 How can we re-imagine its usages? Where is class located? If popular culture increasingly replaces neighbourhood and family as dominant sites for the making of identity, how class-bound is it? As I show in my work on Y or loxion culture (2004) remarkably similar processes of identity-making, especially in the realm of popular culture, emerge between ‘working’ and ‘lower middle-class’ school children in Durban and ‘middle-class’ teenagers in Johannesburg. What kinds of imperfect meshings occur between the micro and the macro, the complexity of people’s lives and the sometimes abstract and general categories we use to describe them? How do technological change, new forms of power, demographic upheavals, urban growth, challenge to stable identities, bureaucratic expansion and deepening market relations affect the making of social lives and the construction and deployment of class identities?
Tim Burke’s (1996) work suggests that class – perhaps not class formations exactly, but relations of economic and social power – needs to be thought about far less mechanistically than it has been to date. In his study of commodity culture in Zimbabwe Burke shows the complexity of ‘proletarianisation’ in a colonial context, and even of the day-to-day living out of poverty and privilege. Questions of class will need to be posed in a context in which not only has South Africa changed, so has capitalism.
Jean and John Comaroff’s (2001) work on ‘millennial capitalism’ suggests that the new South African nation state is not only new in itself but operates in a new world: it must achieve modernity in a post-modern world and a world of ‘casino capitalism’. This is an historically new situation, both internally and internationally. Production as it was known before is increasingly being replaced by provision of services and the capacity to control space, time and the flow of money through speculation. Speculation is not only practised by the middle classes: poor people, too, frequently participate in high-risk investments such as the lottery. In higher echelons, dealing in stocks and bonds whose rise and fall is governed by chance results in new cultures of circulation – the culturally inflected paths along which objects, people and ideas move
All this points to new temporalities or velocities of the social. James Campbell (2002) has written how, given South Africa’s elaborate tradition of labour repression, scholars have focused their attention on production, leaving consumption as something of an ‘historical orphan’.
South African theorists have yet to give an adequate account of these new configurations of the political economy of culture. For this reason it is more important than ever to pay attention to those archives still at times undervalued and, in any case, under-written by historians and anthropologists in South Africa. As Chapter Two will show, one of these archives is that of the city – and the literary – itself.
Above I have considered the analytic resources of an Anglicised and Africanised form of creolisation for a theory of entanglement. In doing so, I have aimed to de-familiarise some of the more routine readings of South African culture. This may not in itself strike the reader as a useful approach. But given the political evidence of substantial change in this country it seems more than apposite to revisit our analytic barometers and yardsticks to find out where they require active redefinition.
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The force-line of this chapter has been the notion of theorising the now. The theoretical parameters I sought are grounded in the realities of conflict, violence, social hierarchy and inequality. They take account too, however, of the making of race identity in terms of cultural traffic – mutabilities within a system of violence which acknowledge the material fact of subjection and registers of action and performance embedded in processes of mobility and lines of exchange. In the preceding pages I have been interested in pursuing the entanglements that occur precisely within contexts of racial segregation and its aftermath, transgressions of the racial order which may take various syncretic forms, at times including a certain racial porousness. I have sought to offer a method of reading the social through the mutual entanglements between people who, most of the time, might define themselves as different, and which receive little attention from those who study them.
A theory of entanglement can be linked in important ways to a notion of desegregation. One could argue that the system of racial segregation in the political, social and cultural structure of the country paradoxically led to forms of knowledge production and cultural critique that mirrored, if only metaphorically, the sociopolitical structure, provoking, ultimately, a form of segregated theory. Segregated theory is theory premised on categories of race difference, oppression versus resistance, and perpetrators versus victims – master dualisms which the Truth and Reconciliation Commission magnified, and aimed, in the longer term, to end.
This was an intricate and often local process which also intersected with, and was influenced by, studies in postcolonial theory which placed a great deal of emphasis on difference. Difference was invoked as a political resource in struggles against imperial drives to homogenise and universalise identity and politics. Difference, then, was a strategic tool against imperial definitions of the universal, and an attempt by those who were the subjugated subjects of imperial rule to maintain an authenticity from which they could articulate claims to selfhood.
After 1994 a space opened up for critical theory to develop ways of reading the contemporary that no longer relied wholly on ‘segregated theory’. After living – and thinking – within a system of legislated difference for so long, that is, it became possible to rethink the absoluteness of difference as a theoretical category and, by extension, the assumption that a lens of difference must be assumed to be essential to any post-colonial project. This is despite the fact that many studies of South African culture after 1994 have dispensed with notions of the inter-racial imaginary and the limits of apartness.
The focus in recent decades, both in South Africa and internationally, has been on the black subject and the white subject as more or less discrete objects of study, and work that focuses on points of connections or similarities or affinities between people, hardly exists. The work of cultural theory remains crucially tied to the work of redress, and the desegregations explored here depend for their ethical weight on the multiple material desegregations which must ensue from this kind of theorising. Such work must necessarily be open to the shifting formations of the present even as racism continues and even when, as Gilroy (2004, p 131) remarks, ‘the crude, dualistic architecture of racial discourse stubbornly militates against their appearance’. It is to these formations that our critical judgement must necessarily be alive.
CHAPTER 2
Literary City
In this chapter I consider the rubric of entanglement from the vantage point of the city. More specifically, I focus on recent novels of Johannesburg, texts which take the city as one of their constitutive subjects rather than as a backdrop to their narratives. The chapter considers the following questions: What might a Johannesburg text be? How does Johannesburg emerge as an idea and a form in contemporary literatures of the city? What literary ‘infrastructures’ are giving the city imaginary shape? Which vocabularies of separation and connectedness surface and recede? What representational forms? Citiness in Johannesburg, as it emerges in the texts below, I will argue, is an intricate entanglement of éclat and sombreness, light and dark, comprehension and bewilderment, polis and necropolis, desegregation and resegregation. Several of the texts examined here are specifically concerned with questions of racial entanglement. Some, like Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow (2000), explore other forms of complexity and foreground epistemological instability.
The most influential body of work on the literary city in South Africa is that focusing on the emergence of Sophiatown and its writers. Sophiatown was the vibrant and racially fluid inner-city
