Entanglement. Sarah Nuttall
will show, one of these archives is that of the city – and the literary – itself.
Above I have considered the analytic resources of an Anglicised and Africanised form of creolisation for a theory of entanglement. In doing so, I have aimed to de-familiarise some of the more routine readings of South African culture. This may not in itself strike the reader as a useful approach. But given the political evidence of substantial change in this country it seems more than apposite to revisit our analytic barometers and yardsticks to find out where they require active redefinition.
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The force-line of this chapter has been the notion of theorising the now. The theoretical parameters I sought are grounded in the realities of conflict, violence, social hierarchy and inequality. They take account too, however, of the making of race identity in terms of cultural traffic – mutabilities within a system of violence which acknowledge the material fact of subjection and registers of action and performance embedded in processes of mobility and lines of exchange. In the preceding pages I have been interested in pursuing the entanglements that occur precisely within contexts of racial segregation and its aftermath, transgressions of the racial order which may take various syncretic forms, at times including a certain racial porousness. I have sought to offer a method of reading the social through the mutual entanglements between people who, most of the time, might define themselves as different, and which receive little attention from those who study them.
A theory of entanglement can be linked in important ways to a notion of desegregation. One could argue that the system of racial segregation in the political, social and cultural structure of the country paradoxically led to forms of knowledge production and cultural critique that mirrored, if only metaphorically, the sociopolitical structure, provoking, ultimately, a form of segregated theory. Segregated theory is theory premised on categories of race difference, oppression versus resistance, and perpetrators versus victims – master dualisms which the Truth and Reconciliation Commission magnified, and aimed, in the longer term, to end.
This was an intricate and often local process which also intersected with, and was influenced by, studies in postcolonial theory which placed a great deal of emphasis on difference. Difference was invoked as a political resource in struggles against imperial drives to homogenise and universalise identity and politics. Difference, then, was a strategic tool against imperial definitions of the universal, and an attempt by those who were the subjugated subjects of imperial rule to maintain an authenticity from which they could articulate claims to selfhood.
After 1994 a space opened up for critical theory to develop ways of reading the contemporary that no longer relied wholly on ‘segregated theory’. After living – and thinking – within a system of legislated difference for so long, that is, it became possible to rethink the absoluteness of difference as a theoretical category and, by extension, the assumption that a lens of difference must be assumed to be essential to any post-colonial project. This is despite the fact that many studies of South African culture after 1994 have dispensed with notions of the inter-racial imaginary and the limits of apartness.
The focus in recent decades, both in South Africa and internationally, has been on the black subject and the white subject as more or less discrete objects of study, and work that focuses on points of connections or similarities or affinities between people, hardly exists. The work of cultural theory remains crucially tied to the work of redress, and the desegregations explored here depend for their ethical weight on the multiple material desegregations which must ensue from this kind of theorising. Such work must necessarily be open to the shifting formations of the present even as racism continues and even when, as Gilroy (2004, p 131) remarks, ‘the crude, dualistic architecture of racial discourse stubbornly militates against their appearance’. It is to these formations that our critical judgement must necessarily be alive.
CHAPTER 2
Literary City
In this chapter I consider the rubric of entanglement from the vantage point of the city. More specifically, I focus on recent novels of Johannesburg, texts which take the city as one of their constitutive subjects rather than as a backdrop to their narratives. The chapter considers the following questions: What might a Johannesburg text be? How does Johannesburg emerge as an idea and a form in contemporary literatures of the city? What literary ‘infrastructures’ are giving the city imaginary shape? Which vocabularies of separation and connectedness surface and recede? What representational forms? Citiness in Johannesburg, as it emerges in the texts below, I will argue, is an intricate entanglement of éclat and sombreness, light and dark, comprehension and bewilderment, polis and necropolis, desegregation and resegregation. Several of the texts examined here are specifically concerned with questions of racial entanglement. Some, like Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow (2000), explore other forms of complexity and foreground epistemological instability.
The most influential body of work on the literary city in South Africa is that focusing on the emergence of Sophiatown and its writers. Sophiatown was the vibrant and racially fluid inner-city suburb of Johannesburg that flourished and then was forcibly removed in the 1950s. Its writers fired literary critical imaginations in new directions, capturing some of the multi-sidedness of Johannesburg’s modernity, showing it to be a place occupied by the black poor, squatters and slum dwellers, and also a centre of urban black culture that, as Paul Gready (2002) has written, ‘offered unprecedented possibilities for blacks to choose and invent their society from the novel distractions of urban life’ (p 145).
Openly critical of liberalism, Sophiatown’s writers, most of whom worked as journalists for Drum magazine,1 neither romanticised the rural nor condemned the moral degradation of the cities, contributing to a new tradition of writing which focused on black experience in the South African city. Much of their fiction tried to capture the racial landscape they inhabited: ‘the interracial frontier,’ writes Gready, ‘was fraught with contradictions and anguish, but while some like Themba later turned their back on it, others made their fictional and actual home in the quagmire of its tensions’ (p 148). They found a style of living and writing which, as Es’kia Mphahlele (1987, p 11) wrote, was ‘racy, agitated, impressionistic … [which] quivered with a nervous energy, a caustic wit’, one which Michael Chapman (1989) saw as providing a social barometer of the decade, and which tapped into the most urgent currents of life in the townships around Johannesburg. Journalism and imaginative writing, the ‘information’ of reportage and the ‘experience’ of storytelling, intertwined to produce writing in Drum shaped by idiosyncratic turns of phrase and narrative markers designed to arouse the reader’s curiosity (Chapman, p 209). In Mphahlele’s acute formulation, black politics was dramatised and, indeed, displayed theatrical style, and writers of the Drum decade found a relative freedom of expression that matched the political expression of the era (p 12). Rob Nixon (1994) has shown how, at a time when the very idea of belonging to the city was coming under increasing legislative pressure, the Harlem Renaissance helped emergent South African writers fortify their claim (p 16).
Sophiatown and its writers, then, dominated the critical imagination of the literary city, drawing the city as a subject more explicitly into being. At the same time, other writing, less focused on by critics, also gave the city voice. In Peter Abrahams’s Tell Freedom (1953), for example, the worlds of Vrededorp and Fordsburg, where he grew up, give way to an encounter with the city at large which was also the making of ‘a new kind of black person’ (p 195).
Born into urban poverty, the son of a coloured South African woman and an Ethiopian man, Abrahams begins to encounter himself in the city through the few books he can get his hands on (‘I desired to know myself … I was ripe for something new, the new things my books had revealed … I felt lonely and longed for something without being able to give it a name … impelled by something I could not explain, I went, night and night, on long lonely walks into the white areas of Johannesburg’ (pp 161-5)). Impelled by longing, but denied access to the city and a new kind of self at every turn, Abrahams finds a job as an ‘office boy’ at the Bantu Men’s Social Centre and here begins reading ‘everything on the shelf marked American Negro literature’ (p 188), a process through which he learns