of these unofficial versions, revealing their largely under-researched duplicity, uncertainty, vulnerability: their secret life.
Chapter Four, ‘Surface and Underneath’, is written in two parts. It takes as its defining idea the notion of Johannesburg as a city with a surface and an underneath. The early part of the chapter explores this concept, suggesting its historical, psychic and hermeneutic dimensions. In broad terms, we might consider this a city in which the ‘surfaces’ of a highly developed industrialised capitalist economy and its attendant set of media cultures are entangled with a subliminal memory of life below the surface – a history of labour repression based on a racial hierarchy; of alienation, but also of insurrection.
If the surface and underneath are part of the historical and psychic life of the city they also finds expression in its literary and cultural formations. The first section focuses on Ivan Vladislavič’s account of living in Johannesburg, Portrait with Keys (2006), and then on two texts by young black South African writers, both published in 2007, which both focus on the concept of the ‘coconut’. The ‘coconut’, a pervasive shorthand for a person who is ‘black on the outside but white on the inside’, also relies on the metaphor of a surface and an underneath and tells us something important about current framings of cross-racial life in the city. In the second part I consider a series of paintings by Johannesburg artist Penny Siopis, known as the Pinky Pinky series. While her work has been read almost exclusively within the register of trauma, I argue that the series reveals a new capaciousness in her figuring of urban life and the desires it produces. Siopis turns her attention to the surface as a painterly and analytical space, and the series suggests the emergence, if tentative, of a more horizontal or spliced mode of reading.
Chapter Five tries to capture something of the immense coincidence, so tangible in Johannesburg at present, between the end of apartheid and the rise of new media culture and cultures of consumption. The chapter, called ‘Self-Styling’, aims to show how we might take the surface more seriously in our analyses of contemporary cultural form even where contemporary youth media cultural forms in Johannesburg still signal to and cite the underneath of an apartheid past. In the first part I explore the rise of a youth cultural form widely known as ‘Y Culture’. Y Culture, also known as loxion kulcha, is an emergent youth culture in Johannesburg which moves across various media forms and generates a ‘compositional remixing’ that signals an emergent politics of style, shifting the emphasis away from an earlier era’s resistance politics. It is a culture of the hip bucolic which works across a series of surfaces in order to produce enigmatic and divergent styles of self-making. In the second part I consider a recent set of advertisements that have appeared on billboards and in magazines in the wake of Y Culture, showing how they simultaneously engage with and push in unexpected directions one of the most striking aspects of Y/ loxion culture, an attempt to reread race in the city. In analysing the advertisements I consider ways in which commodity images, and the market itself, produce re-imaginings of race in the city. How to read these commodified versions of entanglement (which are embedded in a much longer history of consumption and its media forms in this country) and what they can tell us about the remaking, or otherwise, of race in the city, is a question the chapter works with in its concluding section.
Chapter Six – ‘Girl Bodies’ – turns to issues of sexuality, and, in particular, to child rape. The chapter draws on an anecdote of a kind: an image, accompanied by a short text in a newspaper, to consider a subject left largely aside in earlier chapters: the question of gender and sexuality in the making of South Africa’s political transition, and of the violence which has emerged, somewhat spectacularly, into the post-apartheid public sphere.7
My account, which is written in the first person, focuses on the manufacture of anti-rape devices for girls and women – new technologies of the sexualised body. Through the telling of a story I explore how technology itself assigns changing meanings to the domains of the public and the private. I draw out, in the chapter, common interest – and trust in technology – among women from different race and ethnic groups – black and white, Tswana and Afrikaner. I explore sets of fantasies about technological solutions in relation to the body which are currently circulating globally but which take on radically local inflections. The chapter considers forms of re-segregation in a wider context of desegregation, and how re-segregation can be based on cross-racial complicities of a kind in a ‘post-racist’ context. In this chapter I subject a notion of entanglement to its limits, while also examining its most disturbing connotations. Examining the concept from the perspective of its outer edges helps to strengthen our understanding of how it works, where it can be useful, and what aporias we need to be alert to.
The chapters draw on a range of critical and writerly vocabularies. They include that which lies dormant in our analysis most of the time, that which offers a singular versus a general view, and the force of the anecdotal, a register of the unexpected in critical orthodoxies. In doing so, they capture something, I hope, of the complex trajectories of change in South Africa, at the level of content but also of form. In what follows I have wanted to speak about the politics of change as well as the ideas and experiences of self which underlie the social; the potential of metropolitan life as well as its foreclosures; the life of the body as well as the mind; cultures of the city as well as feudal imaginaries of the heartland; legacies, as well as contemporary practices, of racial and sexual violence. Put differently, this book explores ways we find of living together, of occupying the city, secrets we keep or tell, the life of the body, our desire for things, the darkness of sex.
CHAPTER 1
Entanglement
Since the political transition in 1994 South African literary and cultural criticism has bifurcated into two distinctive bodies of work. Two dominant responses have emerged, that is, in relation to the dynamics of political change in the country.
The first bifurcation is an idiom produced by critics both inside and outside the country, which could be characterised as neo-Marxist in inflection. Here, the dominant critical impulse has been to assert continuity with the past, producing a critique based on reiteration and return, and an argument in the name of that which has not changed in the country. Such critics employ categories of race, class, domination and resistance in much the same way as critics had done in the decade or so before. Thus, for example, Herman Wasserman and Shaun Jacobs (2003) acknowledge that ‘certain social configurations have started to shift’ but emphasise that the issues of hegemony, resistance and race that marked an earlier critical idiom need to remain at the centre of our critical investigations and that ‘the reaffirmation of the same identities that in the past were discriminated against require our ongoing critical recognition’. Barbara Harlow and David Attwell (2000, p 2) refer to South Africa as ‘a society whose underlying social relations or even attitudes remain substantially unchanged’. Yet, by the time they were writing, South Africa’s black middle class, for example, emerged for the first time as larger than its white middle class, a statistic which contests a stasis in the social structure of South Africa and suggests the emergence of new kinds of imaginaries and practices in the country. Certainly, by the late 1990s neither recent South African fiction nor popular culture suggested social stasis.
Such readings were, to be sure, born in part of what we could refer to as an ethical oppositionality which seeks to register the ongoing ‘agony of the social’ – the continuing inequalities and suffering of many in South Africa since its political transition. This position resonated with a body of work produced during this period by a number of largely ex-South African critics based in the United States and Britain – even while these critics pushed its critical registers somewhat further. In a 2004 special issue of The South Atlantic Quarterly, entitled ‘After the Thrill is Gone’ and edited by Rita Barnard and Grant Farred, readings of the contemporary South African moment by Neil Lazarus, Grant Farred, Shaun Irlam and others constituted what we could call a narrative of political loss or melancholia.
Loss is
