Imagining the Edgy City ─ Writing, Performing, and Building Johannesburg

"All roads lead to Johannesburg," declares the narrator of Alan Paton's epochal novel, Cry, the Beloved Country. Following roads that lead to performance, novels, film, architecture, and other cultural aspects, Imagining the Edgy City offers a compelling interdisciplinary study of South Africa's largest city. The city's edginess means not only persistent boundaries between the haves and the have-nots but also cosmopolitan diversity and invention. Kruger begins with Johannesburg's fiftieth anniversary marked by the first Empire Exhibition outside Britain and by architecture and performance around 1936, and continues with narrative, performance and photographic responses to the rise of apartheid and decline of inter-racial culture around 1956; poetry and performance around the Soweto uprising of 1976, and fictional and social responses to crime and disorder around 1996. It concludes with the work of artists and planners collaborating in urban renewal projects around 2012. Alongside well-known figures-such as Nadine Gordimer, William Kentridge and David Goldblatt-the book introduces artists, architects, writers, and other chroniclers who remain largely unknown on the international stage. Ultimately Kruger provides a portrait of a modern city whose negotiation of the tensions between incivility and innovation invite truly global comparisons, not only with African cities such as Dakar, or other middle income cities of the "south" such as Bogota, Mexico, or Sao Paolo, but also with cities of the north like Chicago, New York, Paris, and Toronto.

Loren Kruger is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago. Her books include Post-Imperial Brecht (Cambridge, 2004), winner of the MLA's Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Study, and The National Stage: Theatre and Cultural Legitimation in England, France, and America (University of Chicago Press, 1992).