Urban Space in Transformation: The Imagined City's Response to Change in Vladislavić's Johannesburg

Abstract

Our cultural values and socio-political perspectives are reflected in our material environment; when this environment is subjected to drastic change, the effects on these values and perspectives is profound. This article considers the wide-ranging socio-cultural effects of material change, and their implications for an ethics of memory and forgetting, in a post-apartheid urban environment through a close reading of Ivan Vladislavić's Portrait with Keys: The City of Johannesburg Unlocked. In my analysis, I draw on architectural theorist Fred Scott's three possible approaches to existing material and cultural infrastructure, namely demolition, preservation and re-appropriation. Using this framework, and extending it in several ways, I discuss the ways in which processes of demolition/destruction, preservation, and adaptation/re-appropriation are inscribed in Vladislavić's Johannesburg.

Keywords:

• Portrait with Keys
• Vladislavić
• literary representations
• urban space

Notes on Contributor

Nandi Weder teaches Language and Study Skills at the University of Pretoria's Mamelodi campus. Her primary research interests include urban studies, South African literature, architecture in literature and teaching reading comprehension. She has recently completed her MA in English Literature at the University of Pretoria, titled “Urban space in transformation: The imagined city's response to change in Vladislavić's Johannesburg, Pamuk's Istanbul, and Dalrymple's Delhi”. She is currently busy with her PhD in Linguistics that focuses on improving the inferencing skills of undergraduate students.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Vladislavić's text occupies an unusual position somewhere between fiction and memoir. I have found ‘urban chronicle’ to be the most suitable description for the text and refer to it as such throughout this article.

2. Postmodern bricolage plays an important role in Vladislavić's text, which often blurs the lines between fact and fiction and playfully interweaves (non-) fictional narrative and historical narrative with elements of parody and surrealism. In keeping with the postmodern awareness that characterises this text, I assign different names to the author and narrator of/in Portrait, using the term ‘Vlad’ to denote the narrative persona as a textual construct distinct from the author whom I refer to as ‘Vladislavić’.

3. According to Titlestad (2012: 678), during the post-apartheid transformation of South Africa's cities, “perhaps for the first time in our history a complex and complicating literature of the urban has emerged”. He explores the imagined cities of this genre using five “organizing tropes (transition, discrepancy, insinuation, ontology and genre)”, each “a pathway to the literary imagination” (Titlestad 2012: 679–80). Focusing on Johannesburg, Nuttall (2008: 200), on the other hand, “explores the imaginary infrastructures that surface in fiction, producing writerly, metropolitan maps”, choosing to focus on the street, the café, the suburb and the campus as settings for the production of such maps.

4. Scott's three categories are architectural responses. However, since my analysis also includes the treatment of objects such as mementoes, I refer instead to demolition, preservation and re-appropriation as material responses.

5. All references to the primary text are to Ivan Vladislavić's Portrait with Keys: The City of Johannesburg Unlocked, published in 2007 by Portobello.