All roads lead to Johannesburg, remarks the narrator of Alan
Paton's novel Cry, The Beloved Country. Taking this quote as her
impetus, Loren Kruger guides readers into the heart of South
Africa's largest city. Exploring a wide range of fiction, film,
architecture, performance, and urban practices from trading to
parades, Imagining the Edgy City traverses Johannesburg's rich
cultural terrain over the last century. The "edgy city" in Kruger's
exploration refers not only to persistent boundaries between the
haves and have-nots but also to the cosmopolitan diversity and
innovation that has emerged from Johannesburg. The book begins with
the building boom, performances and uneven but noteworthy
inter-racial exchange that marked the city's fiftieth-anniversary
celebration at the Empire Exhibition in 1936. This celebration
rapidly gave way to the political repression and civil unrest that
characterized South Africa from 1950 to 1990. Yet poetry, drama,
fiction, and photography continued to thrive, bearing witness not
only against apartheid but to alternatives beyond it. In the late
twentieth century, the not quite post-apartheid condition fired the
artistic imaginations of film makers as well as novelists. Urban
neglect, rising crime, and the influx of migrants inspired noir
cinema-like Michael Hammon's Wheels and Deals-and fiction about
migration from Achmat Dangor to Phaswane Mpe, and in the
twenty-first, urban renewal has produced public art that
incorporates the desire lines of newcomers as well as natives.
Alongside well-known artists such as Nadine Gordimer, William
Kentridge, and David Goldblatt, the book introduces many artists,
architects, writers, and other chroniclers who have hitherto
received little attention abroad. Ultimately, Johannesburg emerges
as a city whose negotiation of the tensions between incivility and
innovation invites comparisons with modern conurbations across the
world, not only African cities such as Dakar, or other cities of
the "south" such as Bogota, but also with major metropolises in
North America and Europe from Chicago to Paris. A multi-faceted
work that speaks to scholars in urban studies, literature, and
history, Imagining the Edgy City is a rich example of
interdisciplinary scholarship at its best.
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