En fuite, on foot, in thought: Making the metropolis elusive

Abstract

Achille Mbembe and Sarah Nuttall (eds). 2004. Public Culture 16(3), Special Issue, “Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis”. Durham NC: Duke University Press.

The general claim of “Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis” is that this city is influential by virtue of a human possibility presently in formation. This human potential is reconfiguring the limitations of the apartheid spatial inheritance, the volatility of the democratic street, and the apparent superficiality of consumer culture. Among other matters, I consider the meanings given, across the volume, to intellectuals ‘walking in the city'; to the metonymic use of ‘voice'; to urban ethnography as a means of embodying Johannesburg's citiness; to the omission from the volume of Johannesburg as represented in fiction. These considerations all enter my argument that affirming ‘the metropolitan’ as a preferred marker of modern South African identity is more complex in its implications than is allowed by the essays in this collection.