Exploding Johannesburg: Driving in a Worldly City

Abstract

This article argues for the importance of the «system of automobility» to critical cultural studies of Johannesburg, sub-Saharan Africa’s most globalized city. Using Ivan Vladislavić’s 2004 experimental novella The Exploded View as a primary example, it takes issue with the tendency for cultural studies of the city to focus on pedestrian mobility, or «walking in the city», as being an inherently liberatory practice. Without downplaying the «everyday evasiveness» of walking in the city, this article nonetheless points to the different ways in which pedestrian mobility is invariably circumscribed in a city built around the car. In Vladislavić’s novella, for example, characters drive through rather than walk in the city, and this corresponds to an overlooked form of poetics and power relations that are fundamental to what might be described as Johannesburg’s ‘worldly’ personality.