On the Edge of Scrutinizing and Reproducing Urban Imaginations of Johannesburg

In her latest book, Loren Kruger reconsiders visual and literary representations of the city of Johannesburg throughout its history. Her approach is a decidedly historical one, in contravention to the tendency of current literature about Johannesburg to emphasize its contemporary exclusiveness and ignore how it had been represented similarly for more than a century. Numerous books on the city of Johannesburg have been published during the 130 years since its foundation, covering the great narrative of the modern city in Africa to the world-class African post-apartheid city promoted by the current municipality. Recent books such as Lindsay Bremner’s Writing the City into Being. Essays on Johannesburg (2010) or Achille Mbembe and Sarah Nuttall’s special issue of Public Culture titled Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis (2004) have been crucial post-apartheid attempts at understanding transitional Johannesburg on the backdrop of both its apartheid history and legacy and the contingencies and particularities evolving with its transition under the young democracy.

Kruger attempts to make an additional contribution to the existing literature by in fact reconstructing the modes in which Johannesburg had been represented over its lifetime. She criticizes the way the city has been and still is being narrated with gestures that “highlight the now and compress the then” and thus repeat the cycle “of amnesia and reinvention” (2) typical to claims of modernity. Her multi-and interdisciplinary approach, different from most previous publications (apart from her own essays), lends special attention to early and recent film production and various literary genres. Her analysis of selected literary, visual, and musical traditions over more than a hundred years refracts dominant narratives of the past and the present and looks closer at continuities of genres and sociohistorical moments of urban representation.

She sources from “formal and informal archives, published history and fiction, interviews and discussions with family and friends, film, television, visual art, performance, and the urban spatial and temporal practices, actual and invented, official, public, or intensely personal …” (xi). Although the author finds fault with uncritically adopted labels and metaphors of the city, Kruger herself does not step back from finding an adjective to represent its complex position between local and global history, social segregation and cosmopolitan integration, and modernist aspirations and charged histories. She opts for the edgy city: “Imagining the Edgy City argues that, contrary to some recent ‘boosters’ who present their celebration of the ‘African world-class city’ as a novel idea against an allegedly long tradition of fear and loathing, it is rather the vacillation between the heights of enthusiasm and the depths of condemnation that has characterized commentary on Johannesburg by natives and newcomers alike since the upstart city first emerged from the mining camp more than twelve decades ago” (x). Trying to work against “the willful amnesia that has passed for memory in Johannesburg,” Loren Kruger thus hopes that the book “escavates the history of the city and builds new links among recurring themes and forms in the literary, visual, and built representation of the urban imagination …” (19).

With the term “edgy city,” she covers several aspects regarding Johannesburg. In an earlier essay, “Theatre, Crime, and the Edgy City in Post-Apartheid Johannesburg” (2001), she used the term mainly in relation to the nervous state of the town and its inhabitants in the face of “crime and grime” (3) during its “post-anti-apartheid interregnum” in the 1990s (23). By contrast, Kruger now redefines it, taking the productive and innovative side of edginess more into account while referring to the “literal as well as figurative shape of the city over the course of history” (3).

Although Kruger emphasizes this edginess as being shaped in a complex manner by contrasts and contradictions, she also makes clear that it is nothing exceptional, but, with Jennifer Robinsons words, “ordinary” (5). Neither exclusionary urban practices nor the claim for rights to the city are new or exceptional, rather they are typical to a city whose history is marked by migration...