In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

2 Retelling Joburg for TV: Risky City Muff Andersson This paper deals with my experiences as a researcher on a TV show about youth in the city of Johannesburg – now officially called Joburg – while working on a study of intertextuality. My study into intertextuality became my doctorate thesis and, later, turned into a book1 and a few published articles. The title of this paper refers not only to the findings in the seedy underbelly of the city that inform one chapter of my book, but is a nod, intertextually, to the title of a conference on risk and the city held at an institute linked to the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) some years ago. At the Wits Institute of Social and Economic Research (Wiser), in conversation with two directors of Yizo Yizo, I made an early presentation of my city findings and its representation within the series. At that point, my research had not been written up. As time went on, the city research became the least important aspect of my work, and fell outside of my main focus. It has been suggested that for this essay I soup up aspects of my research and attempt a narrative ‘functioning like the memoirs of an «explorer» in the margins of a culture’.2 Exploratory it will certainly be, not only because the ur-text of this slender cityscape was an unpublished report that led to the initial oral account during the Wiser conversation. It was a conversation that would continue later in a different direction at CODESRIA, where the focus was on youth and culture rather than on the city. Even as I write it up now, the focus shifts with each draft as I find it necessary to use the text to point out exactly where and how there have been changes in the city, and for that matter in the political landscape, for better or worse. My findings may have long since strolled out of the margins of culture, lurking now as graffiti on the walls surrounding urban studies, education, psychology, sociology and politics. This is not only because I am writing at the time of the South African election of 2009, and I am therefore more alert than as usual to events in my city, but because my initial research was into a basket of Contemporary African Cultural Productions 30 issues lying beyond the domain of a single discipline. If I wanted to, I could spend my life rewriting my findings for different branches of science and the arts. I promise not to do this. It is boring to reread the works of academics who mercilessly exploit the same tired piece of original research (sometimes, it is not even their own research but observation about someone else’s work, and even then, the observation might not be original) so that they may increase the number of their publications. Besides, those authors who continuously plagiarize their early published works – pinching an earlier article from, say, The Mail & Guardian to fatten a brand new book of their reflections, lifting articles from a lesser known journal when they were young and unknown to republish in an accredited one when they are longer of tooth and think they are no longer capable of innovative thought – will shortly find themselves in a great deal of trouble with the stringent new international copyright laws that make filching of one’s own work a sin. So for showing me the pointlessness of reproducing one’s earlier work verbatim, I am, in the first place, grateful to the editor of this collection. But secondly, I am delighted to be thrown a challenge. As students, we should be ready and able to work in the fashion of any stylish theorist, just as a film maker might pay tribute stylistically to Sembène Ousmane or Gillo Pontecorvo. It is pleasing to consider that the editor must be getting fed up with the cultures of Facebook, MXit and Twitter. No short words, short sentences and short paragraphs for this editor. He challenged me to drop the ‘telegraphic style’ I have developed through excessive usage of communication networks for lazy people in a hurry and to inspire myself instead with a bit of Claude Lévi-Strauss in the course of writing this piece. Indeed, I have even been encouraged to attempt to write in the style of that charming old youth, for that is how I experience him, through a reading of some chapters of his Tristes Tropiques...

Share