At Home in Johannesburg?: Rethinking Cosmopolitanism through TJ/Double Negative, the Joint Project between David Goldblatt and Ivan Vladislavić

This article examines the cosmopolitan character of TJ/Double Negative (2010) and argues that the prize-winning photography book, co-produced by the South African photographer David Goldblatt and writer and editor Ivan Vladislavić, is both a symptomatic expression of uneven development and a self-conscious interrogation of that unevenness. The book comprises two parts: Goldblatt’s iconic photographic series, TJ: Johannesburg Photographs 1948–2010, and Vladislavić’s novel Double Negative, a metafiction that refracts the story of modern Johannesburg along with Goldblatt’s career and the concomitant genre evolution of South African photojournalism from local “documentary” to world-renowned “art,” as TJ reconstructs it. This experiment in interdiscursivity is significant not simply for being the first of its kind—“a unique event in publishing” (“TJ & Double Negative”), as the publisher, Contrasto, declares in its marketing blurb—but also because through this collaborative yet multi-modal venture a new mode of critical cosmopolitanism in world-literature might emerge.