Title: In search of a new epistemology of the urban in the writing of Ivan Vladislavić
Source document: Brno studies in English. 2018, vol. 44, iss. 2, pp. [105]-129
Extent
[105]-129
-
ISSN0524-6881 (print)1805-0867 (online)
Persistent identifier (DOI): https://doi.org/10.5817/BSE2018-2-7
Stable URL (handle): https://hdl.handle.net/11222.digilib/140980
Type: Article
Language
License: Not specified license
Notice: These citations are automatically created and might not follow citation rules properly.
Abstract(s)
This article looks at Ivan Vladislavić's literary explorations of the urban in post- apartheid South Africa, notably those concentrating on and around the city of Johannesburg, drawing examples from The Restless Supermarket (2001), Portrait with Keys: the City of Johannesburg Unlocked (2006), and The Exploded View (2004). Reading Vladislavić, the article traces the writer's involvement with categories, methods and cartographies through which urbanity and urban life after apartheid could be addressed and understood. A point of departure for the discussion is the epistemological crisis of the late 1960s and early 1970s, which challenged the positivist policy in urban research, thereby destabilising the intellectual foundations of urban as well as literary studies concentrating on urbanism. The analysis, recognising the inadequacy of the earlier categories related to the concept of the bounded city, concentrates on a search for new ways of knowing and investigating the increasingly complex urbanity.
References
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[33] Marais, Sue (2017) The economies of repetition: The market, the artistic, and the genocidal in Ivan Vladislavić's "Curiouser". The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 52(1), 27–41. | DOI 10.1177/0021989416684899
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[36] Michel, Berit (2015) Mapping the City –Narrating 'Complexity': Urban Space in the Contemporary Anglophone Novel. Trier: WVT Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier.
[37] Mukherjee, Pablo (2012) Ivan Vladislavić: Traversing the uneven city. Journal of Postcolonial Writing 48 (5), 472–484. | DOI 10.1080/17449855.2012.720797
[38] Mumford, Lewis ([1961] 1979) The City in History. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
[39] Newland, Paul (2008) The Cultural Construction of London's East End: Urban Iconography, Modernity and the Spatialisation of Englishness. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi.
[40] Nuttal, Sarah and Achille Mbembe (2007) Afropolis: From Johannesburg. PMLA 122(1), 280–288.
[41] Pike, David L. (2005) Subterranean Cities. The World beneath Paris and London. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.
[42] Ridley, Philip (2002) Introduction. In: Plays 1. London: Faber and Faber, vii–lx.
[43] Seidel, Matt (2017) A view of South Africa: Ivan Vladislavic. Publisher's Weekly March 3.20 http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/authors/profiles/article/73104-a-view-of-south-africaivan-vladislavic.html (Accessed on March 20, 2017).
[44] Stow, John ([1603]1908) A Survey of London. Reprinted From the Text of 1603. Kingsford, C L (ed.) Oxford: Clarendon 1908. British History Online, http://www.british-history.ac.uk/no-series/survey-of-london-stow/1603 (Accessed on January 6, 2018)
[45] Thrift, Nigel (2004) Driving in the city. Theory, Culture & Society. London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi: SAGE. 21 (4/5), 41–59. | DOI 10.1177/0263276404046060
[46] Tinkler-Villani, Valeria (ed.) (2005) Babylon or New Jerusalem?: Perceptions of the City in Literature. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi.
[47] Vladislavić, Ivan ([2006] 2009) Portrait with Keys: The City of Johannesburg Unlocked. New York, London: Norton & Co.
[48] Vladislavić, Ivan (2004) The Exploded View. Johannesburg: Random House.
[49] Vladislavić, Ivan ([2001] 2014) The Restless Supermarket. London and New York: And Other Stories.
[50] Wachsmuth, David (2014) City as ideology: reconciling the explosion of the city form with tenacity of the City concept. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 31, 75–90. | DOI 10.1068/d21911
[51] Walker, Richard (2015) Building a better theory of the urban. A response to 'Towards a new epistemology of the urban?'CITY 19 (2–3), 183–191. | DOI 10.1080/13604813.2015.1024073
[2] Althusser, Louis (2001) Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses. In: Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. B Brewster. New York: Monthly Review Press, 127–186.
[3] Bremner, Lindsay (2004) Bounded spaces: Demographic anxieties in post-apartheid Johannesburg. Social Identities 10 (4), 455–468. | DOI 10.1080/1350463042000258908
[4] Brenner, Neil (ed.) (2014) Implosions/Explosions. Towards a Study of Planetary Urbanization. Berlin: jovis Verlag GmbH.
[5] Brenner, Neil and Christian Schmid (2015) Towards a new epistemology of the urban? CITY 19 (23), 151–182. | DOI 10.1080/13604813.2015.1014712
[6] Brenner, Neil (2017) The hinterlands, urbanized?. In: Brenner, Neil (ed.) Critique of Urbanization: Selected Essays. Berlin, Gütersloh: Bauverlag, 212–224.
[7] Brenner, Neil and Martin Aboleda (2017) Coda: Critical urban theory, reloded?. In: Brenner, Neil (ed.) Critique of Urbanization: Selected Essays. Berlin and Gütersloh: Bauverlag, 268–289.
[8] Brenner, Neil and Christian Schmid (2017) Planetary urbanization. In: Brenner, Neil (ed.) Critique of Urbanization: Selected Essays. Berlin and Gütersloh: Bauverlag, 186–191.
[9] Brenner, Neil and Daniel Ibañez (2017) The Agency of Design in an Age of Urbanization. In: Brenner, Neil (ed.) Critique of Urbanization: Selected Essays. Berlin and Gütersloh: Bauverlag, 224–236.
[10] Couser, G.Thomas (2012) Memoir: An Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
[11] Davies, Norman and Roger Moorhouse (2003) Microcosm. Portrait of a Central European City. London: Random House.
[12] De Certeau, Michel ([1984] 1988) The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
[13] Genette, Gérard ([1987]1997) Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
[14] Gleber, Anke (1999) The Art of Taking a Walk: Flanerie, Literature, and Film in Weimar Culture. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
[15] Goodman, Ralph (2011) Ivan Vladislavić's Portrait with Keys: Fudging a book by its cover?". In: Gaylard, Gerald (ed.) Marginal Spaces: Reading Ivan Vladislavić. Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 276 –286.
[16] Goonewardena, Kanishka (2005) The urban sensorium: space, ideology and the aestheticization of politics. Antipode. A Radical Journal of Geography 37(1), 46–71. | DOI 10.1111/j.0066-4812.2005.00473.x
[17] Graham, James (2008) Ivan Vladislavić and the possible city. Journal of Postcolonial Writing 44 (4), 333–344. | DOI 10.1080/17449850802410432
[18] Graham, James (2007) Exploding Johannesburg: Driving in a worldly city. Transtext(e)s. Transcultures: Journal of Global Cultural Studies 3, 67–83. | DOI 10.4000/transtexts.140
[19] Graham, Shane (2006) Layers of permanence: Toward a spatial-materialist reading of Ivan Vladislavić's The Exploded View. Scrutiny 2 11 (2), 48–61. | DOI 10.1080/18125440608566044
[20] Harvey, David (2014) Cities or Urbanization? In: Neil Brenner (ed.) Implosions/Explosions. Towards a Study of Planetary Urbanization. Berlin: jovis Verlag GmbH, 52–66.
[21] Herbert, Caroline (2016) Postcolonial Cities. In: McNamara, Kevin R. (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to the City in Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 200–215.
[22] Hinchliffe, Steve (1996) Technology, power, and space—the means and ends of geographies of technology. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 14, 659–682. | DOI 10.1068/d140659
[23] Howard, Jean E. (2007) Theatre of a City: The Places of London Comedy, 1598-1642. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
[24] Jameson, Fredric ([1991] 1997) Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press.
[25] Jones, Megan (2011) Cars, capital and disorder in Ivan Vladislavić's The Eploded View and Portrait with Keys. Social Dynamics 37 (3), 379–393. | DOI 10.1080/02533952.2011.657466
[26] Lefebvre, Henri ([1970] 2003) The Urban Revolution. Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press.
[27] Lefebvre, Henri ([1974] 1991) The Production of Space. Oxford, Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell.
[28] Lehan, Richard (1998) The City in Literature: An Intellectual and Cultural History. Berkeley: University of California Press.
[29] Lenta, Patrick (2009) Everyday abnormality: Crime and in/security in Ivan Vladislavić's Portrait with Keys. Journal of Commonwealth Literature 44 (1), 117–133. | DOI 10.1177/0021989408101655
[30] Lynch, Kevin (1960) The Image of the City. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT.
[31] Maier, Jessica (2015) Early Modern Maps of the Eternal City. Rome Measured and Imagined. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.
[32] Mannovich, Lev (2006) The poetics of augmented space. Visual Communication 5.2, 219–240. | DOI 10.1177/1470357206065527
[33] Marais, Sue (2017) The economies of repetition: The market, the artistic, and the genocidal in Ivan Vladislavić's "Curiouser". The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 52(1), 27–41. | DOI 10.1177/0021989416684899
[34] Merrifield, Andy (2013) The Politics of the Encounter: Urban Theory and Protests Under Planetary Urbanization. Athens and London: The University of Georgia Press.
[35] McLeod, John (2004) Postcolonial London: Rewriting the Metropolis. London and New York: Routledge.
[36] Michel, Berit (2015) Mapping the City –Narrating 'Complexity': Urban Space in the Contemporary Anglophone Novel. Trier: WVT Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier.
[37] Mukherjee, Pablo (2012) Ivan Vladislavić: Traversing the uneven city. Journal of Postcolonial Writing 48 (5), 472–484. | DOI 10.1080/17449855.2012.720797
[38] Mumford, Lewis ([1961] 1979) The City in History. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
[39] Newland, Paul (2008) The Cultural Construction of London's East End: Urban Iconography, Modernity and the Spatialisation of Englishness. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi.
[40] Nuttal, Sarah and Achille Mbembe (2007) Afropolis: From Johannesburg. PMLA 122(1), 280–288.
[41] Pike, David L. (2005) Subterranean Cities. The World beneath Paris and London. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.
[42] Ridley, Philip (2002) Introduction. In: Plays 1. London: Faber and Faber, vii–lx.
[43] Seidel, Matt (2017) A view of South Africa: Ivan Vladislavic. Publisher's Weekly March 3.20 http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/authors/profiles/article/73104-a-view-of-south-africaivan-vladislavic.html (Accessed on March 20, 2017).
[44] Stow, John ([1603]1908) A Survey of London. Reprinted From the Text of 1603. Kingsford, C L (ed.) Oxford: Clarendon 1908. British History Online, http://www.british-history.ac.uk/no-series/survey-of-london-stow/1603 (Accessed on January 6, 2018)
[45] Thrift, Nigel (2004) Driving in the city. Theory, Culture & Society. London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi: SAGE. 21 (4/5), 41–59. | DOI 10.1177/0263276404046060
[46] Tinkler-Villani, Valeria (ed.) (2005) Babylon or New Jerusalem?: Perceptions of the City in Literature. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi.
[47] Vladislavić, Ivan ([2006] 2009) Portrait with Keys: The City of Johannesburg Unlocked. New York, London: Norton & Co.
[48] Vladislavić, Ivan (2004) The Exploded View. Johannesburg: Random House.
[49] Vladislavić, Ivan ([2001] 2014) The Restless Supermarket. London and New York: And Other Stories.
[50] Wachsmuth, David (2014) City as ideology: reconciling the explosion of the city form with tenacity of the City concept. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 31, 75–90. | DOI 10.1068/d21911
[51] Walker, Richard (2015) Building a better theory of the urban. A response to 'Towards a new epistemology of the urban?'CITY 19 (2–3), 183–191. | DOI 10.1080/13604813.2015.1024073