Reconstruction 9.1 (2009)
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S. Nuttall and A. Mbembe, eds. Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis. Duke University Press, 2008, 392 pp, US$27.95 (paperback).
<1> In their edited volume, Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis, Sarah Nuttall and Achille Mbembe, offer their readers a glimpse of contemporary Johannesburg from multiple vantage points, combining to create a singleness of vision that reveals a fractured and layered modern metropolis. However, the cohesiveness that binds this book should not be mistaken for theoretical fixity of the African metropolis. Recognizing that city forms "outpace the capacity of analysts to name them" (25), the editors of Johannesburg seek to unfix rather than fix the meanings of African modernity. As promised in the title, Johannesburg is depicted as elusive, uncontainable and incomplete throughout the pages of this book.
<2> Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis expands upon a special Public Culture issue released in 2004. The book is divided into two parts, with previously printed material and new additions found in both sections. The first half of the book prepares the theoretical groundwork for the various essays and interviews found in the latter half. Throughout, serious treatment is given to the surface spaces of everyday life, from the racial discourse of alcohol ads to the consumption habits of HIV/AIDS patients. The authors examine the daily practices that tie together, flow between, play upon, hide beneath and define Johannesburg, that is, the "dialectic between the underground, the surface and the edges" of the city (17). In treating the surface space as a valid site of inquiry, but not completely abandoning the idea of marginal, hidden and submersed spaces, the chapters in this book, like much of the work coming out of Public Culture, weave their way between Marxist political economy and post-modern cultural studies.
<3> Following the editors' introduction, Mbembe's article on "superfluity" opens the first section, exploring the "indispensability and expendability of both labor and life, people and things" in Johannesburg (38). From its origins as a gold mining town, where a superfluous labor force was used to extract extravagant material wealth from the depths below, to the contemporary city where a surplus population barely survives in squatter camps while a consumer public shops for disposable commodities from sprawling suburban strip-malls, that is, from Johannesburg's colonial past to its neo-liberal present, it has been a city of superfluity, driven by delirious desires and fears (38, 45). Mbembe paints the picture of a city where the remnants of temporal rupture overlay the ruins of spatial fracture, where black and white citizen alike wander amongst the remains of a racial city looking to construct their own narratives of Johannesburg from the sights and sounds around them.
<4> This theme of ruin and fragmentation is carried in a new direction with Abdoumaliq Simone's piece on "People as Infrastructure." Simone brings into view both the "regularity and provisionality" (69) that characterizes social and economic practices in the city. By examining the gap between normative prescriptions for public life, and how people actually live, valorizing neither, Simone suggests that the regular yet often informal and improvised practices of everyday life, and the interdependent social and economic networks constructed through these practices, form a type of human infrastructure that sutures together various fractured spaces.
<5> Just as important as how people survive in this gap between the actual and prescribed, is the way people perform their identities in the space between present reality and future potential, the theme of Sarah Nuttall's insightful chapter on "Stylizing the Self." Here we encounter the apparent fixity of race being challenged by the unfixity of the commodity form, which is seen to allow consumers to construct their own identities. Youth culture in particular epitomizes the practice of creating identities out of the "fragments, bits and pieces" (105) of political, cultural and consumer products that circulate on the surfaces of the city.
<6> Another valuable and original contribution, though slightly less connected to the rest of the volume, is Jonathan Hyslop's attempt to reframe the hagiographies of Mohandas Gandhi and Nelson Mandela. Using the device of James Joyce's Ulysses, and occasionally adopting his judgmental voice, Hyslop suggests that, though Gandhi and Mandela may have fashioned themselves as representative of traditional, national cultural identities, in fact their attempt to transcend myopic and narrow nationalism in favor of inclusive, universal values was a purely modernist political program, made possible by the culturally cosmopolitan and multi-cultural metropolis of Johannesburg. For example, Gandhi's famed civil disobedience tactics were inspired by the Islamic ideal of "sanctified struggle" (128), whereas his Hindu awakening was at least in-part arrived at through discussions with Western Jewish intellectuals interested in Eastern mysticism (129). Though somewhat less developed, Hyslop makes the similar claim that Mandela's exposure to African American culture through the Bantu Men's Social Clubs of Johannesburg is what contributed to his "notably Americanized" view that "modernity and racial liberation could be organically linked", and the rejection of his previously held "Africanist" views (131-133).
<7> The thematically meaty chapters on literature, art and health in Johannesburg in the first part of the book end up being not as satisfying. Rather than exploring further the role of the written word in the city, Nuttall's piece on the "Literary City" instead focuses solely on literary images of the city in contemporary Johannesburg, with no sense given to how this literature is consumed by a reading public. Similarly, David Bunn's piece on "Art Johannesburg and Its Objects" celebrates contemporary art in Johannesburg for accepting the "present state" of the city, but fails to demonstrate the "philosophical inwardness" of this new art culture, which seems only to witness and not challenge, and at times even distract from this present state, despite the traumas of violent evictions being performed at the edges of Mbeki's neoliberal city (166-167). Finally, Frederic Le Marcis's important yet somewhat lacking piece on "The Suffering Body of the City" sketches out the networks constructed between people living with AIDS and health care providers, friends and family, activist groups, as well as the manufacturers and distributors of pharmaceutical drugs and other treatments, tracing the movement of the body from the closet, to the clinic, to the cemetery. However, a deep engagement with the role of governmental practices and business interests in these networks seems lacking, and Le Marcis could have better developed the connection between pandemic and democracy, freedom and sickness (170), doing more to incorporate neoliberalism into this schema.
<8> The second half of the book, titled "Voice Lines", picks up the theoretical themes established in the first section and runs with them through the streets of Johannesburg. In the process, we repeatedly traverse various spaces of the city, from internet cafes where Nigerian "419" e-mail scams originate, to Constitution Hill, the site of a once notorious prison and now the symbol of South Africa's on-going process of democratization, to the mega-mall, which, albeit entirely centered around commodity fetishism and consumption, is nevertheless a unique site of class and racial intermingling. Two standout pieces in this section include Livermon's "Sounds in the City" and Hornberger's "Nocturnal Johannesburg", which respectively examine the sound-scapes of Joburg and the geography of light and dark in the city at night, as well as the identities constructed in these spaces of sound and light.
<9> Readers with a lived experience of Johannesburg will likely be better able to appreciate the subtle observations and references made throughout the book. Nevertheless anyone with an interest in African studies is sure to find this volume a provocative read, while those reading with an eye toward contemporary urban issues, globalization and global cities, or divided societies will also find plenty of interest.
<10> Carrying on a conversation with Michael Watts in response to the original publication of Johannesburg, Arjun Appadurai and Carol A. Breckenridge conclude this volume with a discussion on risk, namely the intellectual risks of writing the complexities, shades of grey, nuances and contradictions of a continent in crisis. The editors ask, can a "politics of hope in Africa" be written "without losing site of its severe sufferings", and can we move beyond pigeonholing Africa in the categories of "race, poverty, corruption and disease" (352) while not depriving these issues the attention they deserve? The issues of crime, disease and poverty are never far from surface of this book, though not as the unifying, or defining trope of the city, and, in general, a decent balance is achieved between "critique and curiosity" (353). The authors take frequent risks in uncovering new areas of inquiry but rarely lose sight of the high stakes of life in the city. If anything, though, the editors do not take enough risks. The second section of the book is stylistically segregated, and though featuring a variety of written registers, from e-mails to interviews, as well as a variety of racial and national perspectives, the voices we read are all academic voices (and mostly male), speaking for, to, and from but rarely with Johannesburg. How can we problematize the tropes of Africa and remain alertly aware of the critical issues facing this continent without more of an effort made to include perspectives from different sectors and segments of the population? For all the productive sites of inquiry this book uncovers, what remains most elusive is not the metropolis itself, but its inhabitants.
Sandy Marshall
University of Kentucky
Department of Geography
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