En fuite, on Foot, in Thought: Making the Metropolis Elusive

Abstract

The general claim of “Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis” is that this city isinfluential by virtue of a human possibility presently in formation. This human potentialis reconfiguring the limitations of the apartheid spatial inheritance, the volatility of thedemocratic street, and the apparent superficiality of consumer culture. Among othermatters, I consider the meanings given, across the volume, to intellectuals ‘walking inthe city’; to the metonymic use of ‘voice’; to urban ethnography as a means of embodyingJohannesburg’s citiness; to the omission from the volume of Johannesburg as representedin fiction. These considerations all enter my argument that affirming ‘the metropolitan’as a preferred marker of modern South African identity is more complex in itsimplications than is allowed by the essays in this collection.