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Post-Apartheid Johannesburg and Global Mobility in Nadine Gordimer’s The Pickup and Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow

2006; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 37; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

1920-1222

Emma Hunt,

Diaspora, migration, transnational identity

In Global Cities, Anthony D. King contends that colonies were granted independence only when the postcolonial city had been globalized. In this way, colonialism was succeeded by a global economy as hierarchies between races became subordinate to new hierarchies between rich and poor, between the West and the developing world. Colonial planning anticipated the structure of the global city, but the global city is also a different kind of space. According to Saskia Sassen, the colonial city concentrated power in a single site, while the global city is a highly organized of strategic sites, economic, technological, and cultural, that transcends national boundaries (Global City 348). More importantly, the global city has become the key site for new power relations produced by globalization. Johannesburg, a creation of colonial resource extraction, is South Africa's richest and largest city. Urban policy developed in 2002 aspires to world-class status for the city by 2030 and ensures that the inequality endemic to Western capitalist cities will be replicated in South Africa on an even larger scale. This blueprint for the city does not envisage a developing city with links to other African cities, but a replication of London or New York without these cities' poor. Johannesburg's globalized identity was affirmed by its winning the 2010 Soccer World Cup, preparation for which has threatened the recent emergence of hybridized spaces, as the city moves forward with its multi-million dollar plan to make the city clean and safe for international spectators. In the country as a whole, President Thabo Mbeki's neo-liberalism, according to which the global economy takes priority over the basic needs of South Africans, has resulted in a disparity between those who work in the formal sector, especially in large corporations, and those who work in the informal sector or who are unemployed. Still, in spite of an urban and national policy that courts global markets, and in spite of the proliferation of exclusive, homogenized spaces, we cannot view Johannesburg as a city where globalization has simply been substituted for apartheid. The city has also seen a conflation of space as people move from the black townships into formerly white areas. Rural migrants and immigrants from the rest of Africa cannot compete with multinational corporations for control of the city. Yet the city has been altered as much by street culture, by Ethiopian and Senegalese immigrants, by hawkers, beggars, and buskers as by new forms of surveillance, by gated communities that emulate Tuscan villages and by air-conditioned shopping malls and casinos. The result is a city of paradoxical spaces, where the formal and the informal coexist in a proximity that would have dismayed apartheid urban planners. This article looks at two texts that have responded to Johannesburg's post-apartheid transformation, Nadine Gordimer's The Pickup (2002) and Phaswane Mpe's Welcome to our Hillbrow (2001). Both texts look at the expansion of the city beyond the borders of the nation: while the Johannesburg of earlier fictional representations stood in for the apartheid nation, here Johannesburg becomes a metonym for an increasingly globalized world. Nevertheless, Gordimer and Mpe articulate two opposing views of globalization: as an unequal exchange of migrant labour and as an equal exchange of culture. Where Gordimer warns that the city has become increasingly divided as it joins a network of global cities linked by capital, Mpe's novella celebrates the city as the site of an ideal of cultural globalization. Gordimer critiques the flows that define the current era of globalization, and draws attention to the way in which class--often concomitant with race, ethnicity, and citizenship--has a bearing on our relative mobility and access to resources. She interrogates the power relations in the new conflation of spaces, and argues that we need to recover a sense of specific place. …