Chapter 12 - Imagining the Migrant in Twenty-First Century Johannesburg

Summary

The chapter engages 21^stcentury Johannesburg through the motif of the migrant. Colonial and apartheid discourses of the city asserted worldliness by insisting on its Eurocentricism, but from its inception it has been physically and psychically shaped by African migrants. The chapter reads the migrant city across three lenses: indeterminacy, hostility and the speculative. The experimental turn in Johannesburg fictions of the 2000s, represented here by Phaswane Mpe and Ivan Vladislavic, imagine a transnational, if contested, city. However, by the 2010s, spatial and formal ambiguity yield to a realism that bears witness to the xenophobic attacks of 2008 and 2015. The writing of diasporic authors such as Novuyo Rose Tshuma and Sue Nyathi, prompts us to imagine Johannesburg from the perspective of the imperilled migrant, for whom the city is often unliveable. In turn, depictions of the city as threat have been complicated by the rise of speculative fiction in whichthe ‘alien’ migrant points towards configurations that are resolutely global. In Lauren Beukes’s and Masande Ntshanga’s work, Johannesburg is a nodal point for imagining affiliations that exceed the boundaries of the human, and the frontiers of the world itself.