Description
Book SynopsisAnxious Joburg focuses on Johannesburg, the largest and wealthiest city in South Africa, as a case study for the contemporary global South city. Global South cities are often characterised as sites of contradiction and difference that produce a range of feelings around anxiety. This is often imagined in terms of the global North’s anxieties about the South: migration, crime, terrorism, disease and environmental crisis. Anxious Joburg invites readers to consider an intimate perspective of living inside such a city. How does it feel to live in the metropolis of Johannesburg: what are the conditions, intersections, affects and experiences that mark the contemporary urban?
Scholars, visual artists and storytellers, all look at unexamined aspects of Johannesburg life. From peripheral settlements to the inner city to the affluent northern suburbs, from precarious migrants and domestic workers to upwardly mobile young women and fearful elites, Anxious Joburg presents an absorbing engagement with this frustrating, dangerous, seductive city. It offers a rigorous, critical approach to Johannesburg revealing the way in which anxiety is a vital structuring principle of contemporary life.
The approach is strongly interdisciplinary, with contributions from media studies, anthropology, religious studies, urban geography, migration studies and psychology. It will appeal to students and teachers, as well as to academic researchers concerned with Johannesburg, South Africa, cities and the global South. The mix of approaches will also draw a non-academic audience.
Table of ContentsMap of Johannesburg – Naadira Patel
Foreword – Sisonke Msimang
Introduction: Traversing the anxious metropolis – Nicky Falkof and Cobus van Staden
Taxi Diaries I What are you doing in Joburg? – Baeletsi Tsatsi
Chapter 1 ‘We are all in this together’: Global Citizen, violence and anxiety in Johannesburg – Cobus van Staden
Chapter 2 ‘It’s not nice to be poor in Joburg’: Compensated relationships as social survival in the city – Lebohang Masango
Chapter 3 Driving, cycling and identity in Johannesburg – Njogu Morgan
Taxi Diaries II Travelling while female – Baeletsi Tsatsi
Chapter 4 ‘The white centreline vanishes’: Fragility and anxiety in the elusive metropolis – Derek Hook
Chapter 5 Ugly noo-noos and suburban nightmares – Nicky Falkof
Chapter 6 The unruly in the anodyne: Nature in gated communities – Renugan Raidoo
Chapter 7 The Chinatown back room: The afterlife of apartheid architectures – Mingwei Huang
Chapter 8 Shifting topographies of the anxious city – Antonia Steyn
Chapter 9 Photography and religion in anxious Joburg – Joel Cabrita and Sabelo Mlangeni
Chapter 10 Marooned: Seeking asylum as a transgender person in Johannesburg – B. Camminga
Chapter 11 Everyday urbanisms of fear in Johannesburg’s periphery: The case of Sol Plaatje settlement – Khangelani Moyo
Chapter 12 Inner-city anxieties: Fear of crime, getting by and disconnected urban lives – Aidan Mosselson
Taxi Diaries III And now you are in Joburg – Baeletsi Tsatsi
Afterword: Urban atmospheres – Sarah Nuttall
Contributors
Index
