Johannesburg as Africa: a postcolonial reading of The exploded view by Ivan Vladislavić

Abstract

Abstract This article argues that Ivan Vladislavić's The exploded view approaches metropolitan life in Johannesburg by way of antinomies such as separation/connection, knowledge/unknowability and intimacy/anonymity. Composed like a rhizome, this work of fiction departs, not only from an earlier practice of separating Johannesburg conceptually from Africa, but also from the current rhetoric of Africanization and national unity. Instead, Vladislavić's exploration of antinomial oppositions deconstructs the boundaries of both the racial identities and the geopolitical imaginary that determine the painful yoking of psyche and architectural topography in his fictional metropolis. The (re)writing of visual representations is of particular importance to this task. By disrupting aesthetic hierarchies and inserting hypostasized images of “Europe” and “Africa” into the flow of narration,“Africanness” is evoked as an itinerant form of becoming rather than a static term in a binary opposition.