Not No Place: Johannesburg. Fragments of spaces and times

abstract

This book review of Not No Place by Dorothee Kreutzfeldt and Bettina Malcomess unpacks the ways in which the city of Johannesburg is experienced and imagined. The architecture of the city – both in the physical sense and the abstract and socially constructed sense – is remembered through personal narratives, short stories, photographs, poetry and essays. This review draws on some of the methodological instruments featured in the book while drawing parallels to (my) subjective/autobiographical memory of Johannesburg. The book itself invites us to make connections between times and places in Johannesburg while recognising that some identities are more vulnerable to spectacular forms of violence. I write this review to deliberately highlight the workings of binaries and dichotomous thinking which, as Gqola (2015) argues in Rape: A South African Nightmare, always create a violent and problematic differentiation between who and what is dominant vs. submissive. This insistence of thinking within a power paradigm limits our imagination of what Johannesburg could look like and the ways in which we understand the politics of belonging to a city. Accounts of xenophobic, racial, gendered and sexualised violence are some of the main themes featured in the review. It is the ‘I’ that makes the ‘we’, and so in reviewing Not No Place I can only hope that we begin to remember and make those connections so that a collective memory of the past leads us to a better imagined present.

keywords:

• time
• story-telling
• memory
• violence
• city

Notes

1. One of the struggle songs sung by activists who were resisting the apartheid regime. There are many contestations around the meaning of this song, but it speaks to the reclaiming of a country, a continent through the movement of others.

2. So called in the following publication by the Central Strategy Unit of the Office of the Executive Mayor of Johannesburg (2011): Joburg 2040: Growth and development Strategy, City of Johannesburg Metropolitan Municipality, available at: http://www.joburg.org.za/gds2040/pdfs/joburg2040_gds.pdf, site accessed July 18, 2016.

3. Referring to cisgender and heterosexual notions of what constitutes being male or female, which usually aligns sex with gender.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mbali Mazibuko

MBALI MAZIBUKO completed her Bachelor of Arts degree in Political Sciences and Sociology at the University of the Witwatersrand in 2015. She is now doing a joint Honours degree at the same University in Politics and Sociology. She has gone on to form part of the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship cohort of 2015/2016, and is also a recipient of the Ruth First Memorial Prize which recognises her outstanding performance within the Department of Sociology. This year she forms part of the Honours research cohort in Local Histories and Present Realities under the National Research Foundation, where she investigates the project of black love in Soweto’s Mzimhlophe Women’s Hostel.