Ivan Vladislavić: Traversing the uneven city

Abstract

The specificities of the African metropolis, or “Afropolis”, have been recently debated by a number of influential theorists of globalization and urban growth. This article registers these debates, but suggests that instead of a model of flows, fractures and hybridization, African metropoles reveal globalization as a process of radically uneven accumulation, excess and dispossession. Taking Johannesburg as a paradigmatic “Afropolis”, it suggests that such a process of simultaneous and excessive accumulation and dispossession demands the invention of correspondingly radical representative strategies that are capable of exceeding accepted cultural norms and idioms. The work of Ivan Vladislavić seems to be just such a cultural articulation of the forms of uneven development.

Keywords:

• Ivan Vladislavić
• Johannesburg
• uneven development
• Portrait with Keys
• world literature