Reading the Post-Apartheid City. Durbanite and Capetonian Literary
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Olivier Moreillon Reading the Post-Apartheid City Durbanite and Capetonian Literary Topographies in Selected Texts Beyond 2000 λογοςλογος Olivier Moreillon Reading the Post-Apartheid City Durbanite and Capetonian Literary Topographies in Selected Texts Beyond 2000 Logos Verlag Berlin λογος Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Na- tionalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de c Logos Verlag Berlin GmbH 2019 Alle Rechte vorbehalten. ISBN 978-3-8325-4830-8 Logos Verlag Berlin GmbH Comeniushof, Gubener Str. 47, 10243 Berlin Tel.: +49 (0)30 / 42 85 10 90 Fax: +49 (0)30 / 42 85 10 92 http://www.logos-verlag.de Dedication For my parents, Hugo and Daniela Moreillon, whose love and guidance have made me the person I am. And for Helton, for being my home and for your patience and support all along this at times seemingly never-ending adventure. Acknowledgements But for the support, encouragement, and guidance of the many people I have had the pleasure to meet and collaborate with along the way, this book, which was submitted as my doctoral thesis in Anglophone Literary and Cultural Studies at the English Department of the University of Basel (Switzerland), would not exist. Most importantly, I owe a heartfelt, gargantuan thank you to the magnifi- cent Danyela Demir. Time and again you lent me a patient ear during one of our excessive (and more or less PhD-related) FaceTime conversations that left the Internet connection between Zürich and Augsburg, then Durban, and now Johannesburg temporarily overloaded. Your thorough reading of my work, your trenchant criticism, and your tireless encouragement have decisively in- fluenced this project. I am also grateful to my supervisor Prof. em. Dr. Therese Steffen (Univer- sities of Basel and Zürich) whose seminar “Living the City” got me hooked on contemporary South African fiction back in 2008. Thank you for your patience and feedback. Thank you also for your tireless commitment within the Swiss South African Joint Research Programme (SSAJRP), an interdisciplinary ex- change project between the University of Basel and several South African Uni- versities from 2007 to 2015, which offered me a fruitful academic network within which I could conduct my research. It is through the SSAJRP that I was introduced to Prof. em. Dr. Lindy Stiebel (University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban) who over time has become so much more than my co-supervisor. Thank you, uMama Lindiwe, for opening your ‘magic house’ at the end of Pinsent Road, for your hospitality, your guid- ance, and your friendship. I will never forget the day I was sitting upstairs at your desk, writing part of my analysis on Mariam Akabor’s Flat 9 while the Azaan was echoing from one of the nearby minarets, Bailey lying next to me, snorting an impatient demand for his evening walk. I am furthermore indebted to my second co-supervisor Prof. Dr. Ina Ha- bermann (University of Basel). It was in your colloquia that my spatially- oriented theoretical approach matured and that my initial project idea ripened to a fully fleshed PhD project. Thank you, and Prof. Dr. Philipp Schweighau- ser, for your generous support and for hosting me as a research associate at the English Department of the University of Basel. Finally, I would like to gratefully acknowledge the Swiss National Sci- ence Foundation (SNSF). I was a recipient of the Doc.CH scholarship between i 2014 and 2016, which allowed me to fully dedicate myself to my PhD during those two years. The SNSF, together with the SSAJRP, also funded my repeat- ed research stays in South Africa between 2012 and 2016. A shortened version of Chapter 1.1 “Mariam Akabor’s Flat 9” appeared as “‘Remember the Old Days?’: Durban’s Grey Street Area in Mariam Aka- bor’s Flat 9” in Cities in Flux: Metropolitan Spaces in South African Literary and Visual Texts, edited by Olivier Moreillon et al., Lit Verlag, 2017, pp. 145–169. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION .................................................................................... 1 SOUTH AFRICAN URBANISATION .............................................................................. 1 THE APARTHEID CITY ................................................................................................ 3 AFRICAN (URBAN) STUDIES ....................................................................................... 7 SOUTH AFRICAN URBAN THEORY, OR, ON TOPOGRAPHY .................................... 10 ENTANGLEMENT AND THE LITERARY CITY, OR, ON TOPOLOGY ........................... 13 ON SPACE AND PLACE ............................................................................................. 17 DURBANITE AND CAPETONIAN URBAN STUDIES ................................................... 21 SOUTH AFRICAN LITERATURE ‘BEYOND 2000’ ....................................................... 26 THE STRUCTURE OF THE STUDY ............................................................................... 31 CHAPTER 1: (IM)MEMORABLE PLACES ....................................... 35 1.1 MARIAM AKABOR’S FLAT 9 .............................................................................. 40 APARTHEID AND POST-APARTHEID NOSTALGIA IN FLAT 9 .................................. 43 THE GREY STREET AREA IN FLAT 9 .......................................................................... 49 GENERATIONAL CONFLICTS .................................................................................... 59 1.2 ROZENA MAART’S ROSA’S DISTRICT SIX ........................................................ 68 APARTHEID NOSTALGIA IN ROSA’S DISTRICT SIX .................................................. 73 DISTRICT SIX AND CAPE TOWN IN ROSA’S DISTRICT SIX ....................................... 87 SEIZING THE (PAINFUL) PAST .................................................................................. 94 CHAPTER 2: MAD(DENING) PLACES .......................................... 103 2.1 JOHAN VAN WYK’S MAN BITCH ..................................................................... 109 ROMANTIC DURBAN/DEVILISH DURBAN: THE POINT AREA IN MAN BITCH .... 115 THE ECONOMY OF LOVE FOR SALE ....................................................................... 127 MENTAL AND PHYSICAL DIS-EASE ....................................................................... 130 2.2 K. SELLO DUIKER’S THIRTEEN CENTS ............................................................ 141 CAPE TOWN: ‘(STEP-)MOTHER(LY) CITY’ ............................................................. 147 COLOUR MATTERS .................................................................................................. 153 WALKING ‘TOWARDS THE LIGHT’ ......................................................................... 165 iii CHAPTER 3: USTOPIAN PLACES .................................................. 177 3.1 BRIDGET MCNULTY’S STRANGE NERVOUS LAUGHTER ................................ 182 PRECARIOUS LIAISONS ........................................................................................... 183 THE UNHOMELY ..................................................................................................... 188 THE CITY OF DURBAN IN STRANGE NERVOUS LAUGHTER ................................... 192 MAPPING LOVE AND TRACING HOME-PLACES .................................................... 196 FORMAL ELUSIVENESS ............................................................................................ 207 3.2 LAUREN BEUKES’ MOXYLAND ........................................................................ 213 THE HYPERREAL ..................................................................................................... 217 CAPE TOWN, 2018: ‘GHOST(LY) CITY’ ................................................................... 218 A ‘SOUTH AFRICAN WATERGATE’ ........................................................................ 236 NARRATIVE AND SYMBOLIC HYPERREALITY ........................................................ 239 CONCLUSION ..................................................................................... 245 WORKS CITED .................................................................................... 255 TABLE OF FIGURES ........................................................................... 283 iv INTRODUCTION The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban re- sources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city. It is, moreover, a common rather than an individual right since this transformation inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power to reshape the processes of ur- banization. The freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is, I want to argue, one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights. – David Harvey, “The Right to the City”. (23) With cities, it is as with dreams: everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire or, its reverse, a fear. Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else. – Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities. (44) SOUTH AFRICAN URBANISATION Historically, urban settlements in southern Africa can be traced back to pre- colonial times. Mapungubwe, situated in today’s Limpopo province, was one of the first urban clusters in southern Africa and came into being