IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/cjssxx/v40y2014i1p7-19.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Inside Out – The New Literary Geographies of the Post-Apartheid City in Mpe's and Vladislavić's Johannesburg Writing

Author

Listed:
  • Russell West-Pavlov

Abstract

This article examines the strategies used by Johannesburg writers Phaswane Mpe and Ivan Vladislavić 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. I begin by sketching 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 Vladislavić, I examine figures of the ‘inside out’, specifically Mpe's use of narratological loops and Vladislavić'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.

Suggested Citation

  • Russell West-Pavlov, 2014. "Inside Out – The New Literary Geographies of the Post-Apartheid City in Mpe's and Vladislavić's Johannesburg Writing," Journal of Southern African Studies, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 40(1), pages 7-19, January.
    • Handle: RePEc:taf:cjssxx:v:40:y:2014:i:1:p:7-19
    DOI: 10.1080/03057070.2014.877655
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/03057070.2014.877655
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/03057070.2014.877655?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:taf:cjssxx:v:40:y:2014:i:1:p:7-19. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/cjss .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.