Imagining the Edgy City: Writing, Performing, and Building Johannesburg by Loren Kruger (review)

The title of artist William Kentridge’s film series “Johannesburg, Second Greatest City after Paris” captures both the ambitious self-regard and anxious self-doubts of this major African metropolis. In her important new book, Loren Kruger labels Johannesburg an “edgy” city—nervous and unpredictable, a space of perpetual demolition and renovation, a boom town built more on speculation than planning, and always haunted by its violent economies of extraction, its entrenched histories of racialized labor exploitation. Using a comparative-literature frame, Imagining the Edgy City narrates the history of Johannesburg through its novels and plays, films, enactments, and edifices. Kruger intends the book as an antidote to the “willful amnesia that has passed for memory in Johannesburg” (19), a space historically of denial (and denial of rights), while at the same she wants to insert this “upstart” city into larger global discourses of cosmopolitanism. Kruger asserts that Johannesburg’s edginess—whether measured by today’s burgeoning suburbs of malls and gated communities at the city’s ever-sprawling perimeter or by its rough city center of the informal, the migrant, the undocumented—is far more ordinary than exceptional when considered in a global context.

The book’s dust jacket announces that the author “navigates a tsunami” of materials. While one can debate whether tsunamis actually are navigable, Kruger’s exhaustive project does manage to stay afloat through a great surfeit of materials, facilitated by the author’s characteristic encyclopedic skills. To those who know Johannesburg well, many treasures await in this volume’s rich assembly of archival and empirical details. To those unfamiliar with “Jozi,” Imagining the Edgy City will serve as a provocative introduction, a kind of artistic and historical “Let’s Go” guide from which one can puddle-jump by decades (two at a time) through the twentieth and into the twenty-first century. Using the phrase “what time is this place?” from urbanist Kevin Lynch as an organizing idea, Kruger excavates place through time, beginning in 1936, the year of the Empire Exhibition and Johannesburg’s first bid for the status of global cosmopolitan modernity. After juxtaposing debates about the exhibition with ideas from architects, labor revolts, and a 1937 play called Red Rand, Kruger then moves on to 1956, an era dominated by the sprawling Treason Trial that accused 156 people and lasted for over six years. One glimpses in this chapter both familiar and obscure artists from Sophiatown, the intercultural bohemia that flourished prior to traumatic forced removals. Kruger tours this era through films, social melodramas, photography, and a cantata.

The book then shifts to the formative year of 1976, the date of the infamous Soweto uprising when school children protesting the forced use of Afrikaans language in schools were brutally mowed down by the police. This was also the year when the Market Theatre was founded and became a formative institution of theatre-making for decades to come. Charged locations of this era serve as coordinates that anchor Kruger’s analysis of works by poets and playwrights, along with André Brink’s novel A Dry White Season and the photography of David Goldblatt. Jumping two decades forward to 1996, the next chapter lands just two years after South Africa’s first national democratic elections and just as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings were getting underway. The chapter analyzes films, a television series, prose texts, and a play, and it concludes with one of the book’s more lavish treatments of a single artist, Ivan Vladislavić. His self-irony, humor, nonlinear disorientations, and perambulations emerge vividly in Kruger’s analysis of his work and its portrayal of “the unsettling spatial practices of urban dwellers in the apartheid, anti-apartheid, and post-anti-apartheid built environment” (184). In the final chapter, Kruger’s temporal structure breaks from the bi-decade interval (forgivably, since 2016 has not yet arrived). The book ends at the year 2012, the centenary of the African National Congress, an era also marred and...