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Periodical article | Leiden University catalogue | WorldCat |
Title: | Inside out - the new literary geographies of the post-apartheid city in Mpe's and Vladislavic's Johannesburg writing |
Author: | West-Pavlov, Russell |
Year: | 2014 |
Periodical: | Journal of Southern African Studies (ISSN 1465-3893) |
Volume: | 40 |
Issue: | 1 |
Pages: | 7-19 |
Language: | English |
Geographic term: | South Africa |
Subjects: | prose literary criticism urban society |
About persons: | Ivan Vladislavic (1957-) Phaswane Mpe (1970-2004) |
External link: | https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03057070.2014.877655 |
Abstract: | This article examines the strategies used by Johannesburg writers Phaswane Mpe and Ivan Vladislavic in their texts 'Welcome to Our Hillbrow' (2001) and 'Portrait with Keys: The City of Johannesburg Unlocked' (2006) to make sense of the bewildering transformations of post-apartheid Johannesburg (South Africa). The author first sketches the transformations of the city in the wake of the dismantling of apartheid-era segregation, sketching in particular the way in which the city has been turned 'inside out'. Then, in the texts by Mpe and Vladislavic, he examines figures of the 'inside out', specifically Mpe's use of narratological loops and Vladislavic's implementation of the figure of the Möbius strip, to show how these recent literary texts have attempted to elucidate the vertiginous demographic changes in the city. Notes, ref., sum. [Journal abstract] |