Somewhere else: social connection and dislocation of Ethiopian migrants in Johannesburg

ABSTRACT

The meaning of personal relationships for Ethiopian migrants to Johannesburg is shaped by individual connections, by imported social networks that are adapted in the host city, and by the particular conditions of livelihood creation in the emerging Ethiopian entrepreneurial enclave of ‘Jeppe’. In their migration individuals experience both rupture and reconnection – with relatives, as well as through relationships and networks that constitute social capital in Johannesburg. The social world of Ethiopian migrants in this entrepreneurial enclave is complex. Many social connections and dislocations are affected by the life choices in which income generation and economic relations are the primary aim and social relations are necessarily secondary. Others are influenced by the strength of informal social networks that serve the needs of Ethiopian migrants. And, far from ‘here’ and ‘there’ being connected through the use of technology and advanced connectivity, ‘home’ and Johannesburg are experienced as quite separate and different places.     

‘The challenges of living here and there’: conflicting narratives of intermarriage between Cameroonian migrants and South Africans in Johannesburg

The influx of Africans into South Africa poses several challenges to the new democratic government. Today, the new government preoccupies itself not only with finding sustainable solutions for pathologies such as poverty, crime, and social violence but also with formulating succinct laws to regularise and curb the increasing population of Africans in major cities like Johannesburg. These laws have complicated the acquisition of legal documents for foreign Africans to reside in the country permanently. This article examines the dynamics of intermarriage between Cameroonian migrants and locals in Johannesburg, as a strategy for permanent residency in South Africa. It seeks to understand these relationships through the viewpoints of the various actors and how they give meaning to Cameroonian experiences of displacement. It concentrates on the actors' discrepant interpretations and their implications for autochthony, belonging, and transnational identities, as well as for issues of social inclusion and exclusion in the new South Africa.     

Do street traders have the ‘right to the city’? The politics of street trader organisations in inner city Johannesburg,post-Operation Clean Sweep

Street trader organisations are paradoxical objects of study. Their claims resist being analysed through the ‘right to the city’ lens, so contested are rights to inner city spaces between multiple users, not all of them in dominant socioeconomic positions; and so ambiguous is the figure of the street trader, oppressed but also appropriating public space for profit, increasingly claiming, in neoliberalising cities, an entrepreneurial identity. In the aftermath of the 2013 ‘Operation Clean Sweep’ (in which the City of Johannesburg unsuccessfully attempted to evict street traders from its inner city), this paper unpacks the politics of street trader organisations: how they organise their constituencies, frame their claims, forge unlikely alliances and enter into disempowering conflicts in engagements with a divisive municipality.     

“A garden had been left to grow wild there”: considering nature in Ivan Vladislavić’s Johannesburg

Johannesburg has frequently been subjected to critical examinations that conceive the city as a metropolis dominated by late capitalist excess and gold mining hyperbole. Along these particular lines, much of the literary scholarship that considers Vladislavi?’s city texts have focussed on his conception of the built environment that critiques its exploitative extractive history and its simulacral tendencies. However, sustained critical attention of his treatment of nature in the urban space has largely been neglected or underplayed. The natural Highveld environment, for Vladislavi?, occupies a fraught and liminal space in the city, pushed to the margins of a brutalizing modernity. Nature in Johannesburg, he opines, is a construction, an imposition and inheritance that belies the city’s colonial and European settler history. However, there are moments in which, when human attention is turned away, nature in its untended and generative capacity works to unmake the structural obduracy of the settled city. This manifests in episodes that embrace the quiet potency of wild gardens that disrupt the urban status quo.     

Spectacles of Dystopia: Lauren Beukes and the Geopolitics of Digital Space

Lauren Beukes’ latest novels—The Shining Girls (2013) and Broken Monsters (2014)—present forays into new generic and geopolitical spaces, shifting from the Joburg and Cape Town-based “allegorical apartheids” of the science-fictional texts Moxyland (2008) and Zoo City (2010) to supernatural crime novels set in dystopian American cities. This paper explores the productive tension between the global and the local in her body of work, framed within the concepts of “developing world” science fiction and the figure of the hybrid. I argue that the esthetics and generic conventions of “cyberpunk” often associated with Beukes animate a seemingly ubiquitous dystopian space. Her writing explores the dissemination of commercial icons, visual fads, and digital pop-objects around and within global bodies: networked, linked electronically, and sometimes physically in what I suggest comes to form the illusion of a digital, dystopian everywhere, relentlessly performing transcendence of locality.     

Servicing “intimate publics”: Johannesburg and Baltimore department stores in the 1960s

ABSTRACT

Based on archival and interview research in the US and South Africa, this paper examines two moments of public debate around access to the space of department stores in Johannesburg and in Baltimore in the 1960s. In Baltimore, African American students organized a sit-in protest at lunch counters and restaurants of major department stores to contest not being served. In Johannesburg, the National Union of Distributive Workers (NUDW), campaigned against job reservation in service and clerical work in stores in Johannesburg to argue for black workers’ access to employment. The paper contends that as “intimate publics,” department stores offer a site to compare the affective articulations of race, class, and gender in both places, which track differing political imaginaries at a moment when consumption was expanding and workforces were changing.     

Ecologies of blood in Johannesburg vampire fiction

This essay reads two contemporary Johannesburg vampire narratives, the film Eternity (2010) and the graphic novel Rebirth (2012), as part of a body of fiction that sees post-apartheid Johannesburg as a laboratory for new forms of life. While recent Johannesburg science fiction has imagined the emergence of new and more fluid forms of being in Johannesburg, the vampire narrative employs a far older and more restrictive type of monster. By virtue of its intimate relationship to blood – with its mythical overtones of racial and national essence – and its peculiarly blank and limited form of being, the vampire is a productive figure for imagining whiteness. In this essay, I examine how the Johannesburg vampire registers the mutations of whiteness in the post-apartheid context. Located in a contaminated and contaminating city of hidden capillaries and networks, vampiric blood runs across and perforates the traditional blood bonds of race, family, and nation. Indeed, dependent on a precarious and potentially diseased resource, the Johannesburg vampire is always on the cusp of dissolving the very whiteness it figures. I am interested in the way in which these vampire narratives alternately reinforce and interrogate what I call the politics of prolongation; that is, in the ways in which their horizontal and entangled “haemopoetics” attempt to displace the genealogical poetics of blood that have traditionally suffused the colonial enterprise and its literature.     

Commercial graffiti: self-expression,the allure of danger,or graffiti made “pretty”?

The visual stylistic elements of graffiti are increasingly being used in the commercial world of advertising and marketing, as backdrops for music videos, and in merchandise and packaging. This market-oriented graffiti constitutes the mainstreaming of a subculture, that is, selling the stylistic subcultural elements as a new fad. Subsequently, commercial graffiti has been criticised for undermining the essence of real graffiti as the very aspect it seeks to oppose is now served, and in the process graffiti is robbed of its resistance identity. This article engages critically with this view by enquiring how Johannesburg commercial graffiti writers make sense of their commercial graffiti work. In a qualitative study, 11 commercial graffiti writers, who are engaged in small commercial contracts or who are freelancing for well-established consumer brands, and full-time graphic designers, were interviewed. Reoccurring themes that arose included self-expression and simplifying graffiti styles to be more accessible and “pretty” for general public consumption. Albeit in a different way, the recognition the graffiti writers gained from the public through their commercial work echoes some elements of the recognition gained through graffiti crews. Probably the most astounding finding of the study is that they felt that the commerciality of graffiti is simply a temporary phase that will eventually fade.     

The global,the local and the hybrid in the making of Johannesburg as a world class African city

In 2000 the city of Johannesburg adopted the vision of becoming a World Class African City (WCAC). Since then Johannesburg has been energetically promoted in accordance with this vision. The tagline ‘world-class African city’ is now used in the branding of the city. It has become a major signifier on its logo and a notable catchphrase in its radio adverts of its brand. However, the nested opposition of the ‘world-class’ and ‘African’ discourse has not been explicitly defined in the vision beyond their simplistic connection. Many people have found the vision puzzling and some have questioned its claims. This paper explores the conundrum that lies in the nested opposition of the ‘world-class’ and ‘African’ discursive currents. It identifies the ‘global’ and ‘local’ discursive forces (in the country) which were formative in the creation of the vision. It looks at how the intersection of global and African discursive fronts has become leverage for generating hybrid cultural/cosmopolitan identities. The thrust of the paper is that the urban practices and landscapes of post-apartheid Johannesburg are enacted and re-enacted together with the inspiration, signification and/or representation of the city vision.     

Upward mobility implications on the aspirant middle class in emerging economies

This article unearths the salient factors that trap the aspiring middle class in their progression towards a stable middle class in the City of Johannesburg, South Africa. The study utilises a quantitative case study design, drawing on a sample of 449 aspirants and 578 middle-class heads of households from the 2021 Gauteng City-Region Observatory Quality of Life Survey. A binary logistic regression model was used to analyse these salient factors (key determinants) and their impact on the social mobility of the aspirant middle class. Findings reveal a significant relationship between social mobility and education, racial inequality, asset ownership, access to economic opportunities and proximity to amenities. We suggest local government policies that positively influence the conditions of these determinants for sustained mobility of the aspirant middle class over time.