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  • Anxious Joburg: the inner lives of a global south city ed. by Nicky Falkof and Cobus van Staden
  • Manuel Dieterich (bio)
Nicky Falkof and Cobus van Staden (eds) (2020) Anxious Joburg: the inner lives of a global south city. Johannesburg: Wits University Press.

While reading this book, I was most fascinated by how the authors manage to create such a vivid, vibrant, and diverse picture of urban life in Johannesburg. Like a colourful bouquet, this anthology brings together very different perspectives from scholars, writers, activists, and photographers, all held together by the bond of anxiety. The engagement with this topic strikes a chord with the zeitgeist in a double sense: as Sarah Nuttall notes in her afterword, urban studies is increasingly focusing on cities as ‘structures of affect and producers of atmospheres’ (267) and at the same time, the examination of the thematic complex of fear/anxiety is highly topical, as numerous publications show. However, it becomes apparent that fear receives a lot of attention in this context (eg Nussbaum 2019) or about Johannesburg (Murray 2020) but anxiety has so far been treated marginally. This publication changes that.

By applying the ‘lens of a feeling’ (4), the editors try to go beyond an instrumental perspective on Global South cities, which, because it emphasises their dysfunctionality and thus recognises them only as pale imitations of Global North cities, is on a colonial continuum. Focusing on anxiety as a condition makes it possible to look behind the salient urban features and to explicate the common affective backdrop that shapes the space and connects ‘many of the disparate elements and ways of living that characterize Johannesburg’ (5). This is where the most challenging point for me as a reader comes into play, which at the same time reflects the strength (the diversity and liveliness) of the book: anxiety is conceptually understood so broadly in the different contributions that the concept becomes unclear and no longer seems properly graspable. Anxiety is understood [End Page 80] as a psychological state on the individual and social/collective level, as a structural condition and also as an urban atmosphere. The ontological status thus remains open. The triggers or themes of the emotion are equally broad. Anxiety is associated with uncertainty, social change, modernity in general, but also the perception of one’s own vulnerability or exposure to paradoxes or contradictions. Here, a conceptual clarification would have done well in order to explain the connections and relationships between the different readings and to outline anxiety even more precisely as a scientific concept. This, however, does not detract from the book as such nor from the reader’s enjoyment.

The book consists of 12 chapters with three taxi diaries by writer Baeletsi Tsatsi interspersed, a foreword by writer Sisonke Msimang, a map locating the different contributions in greater Johannesburg, an introduction by the editors and an afterword by Sarah Nuttall. The diversity of the empirical material reflects the different academic and non-academic backgrounds of the contributors and is indeed impressive: interviews, fieldwork, group discussions, media discourses, historical documents, movies, literature, images, autoethnographic material and theatre plays. In addition to the topics mentioned by the editors – ‘crime, race, gender, status, space and authenticity’ (8) – extreme social inequality, consumerism, nature, vulnerability and the perception or experience of ambivalences are also central issues throughout the book. It is interesting to note that anxieties are dealt with both by vulnerable and powerless groups and by relatively powerful groups, with both having specific anxieties. Another salient aspect is the productivity of anxieties. Obviously, anxieties can limit people’s options and also have oppressive features. However, some contributions point to the transformative power of anxieties because they can also enable people to do things or initiate social change in a positive direction.

In the first chapter, Cobus van Staden uses the Global Citizen Festival in December 2018 in Johannesburg and the accompanying violence after the event as an empirical prism to shed light on local and global anxieties. These are mainly the product of an inability or unwillingness of (semi-state) institutions to provide material infrastructure as well as public security. Coupled with the widespread assumption in South Africa of a potential omnipresence of...

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