Online Discussion with Bridget Kenny | 3 August | 6pm

WiSER invites you to an online discussion by

Bridget Kenny (Sociology, Wits)

Lift Noir: The ‘intimate publics’ of elevators in 20^th c. Johannesburg
 

What are some of the intimate scenes that have unfolded in Johannesburg lifts over the 20^th century? Drawing on a wide newspaper archive, this research tracks how, through narratives of gruesome accidents and dark crime in particular, dramas of urban change surfaced as fear of technological failure and stranger encounter in the lift, as gender and race coordinated divisions of public and private. The debates around such spaces in downtown Johannesburg buildings offer us readings of how intimacy worked to shape public discourses. Lauren Berlant’s (2022) On the Inconvenience of Other People queries ‘proximities’ to each other. Lifts, it will be argued, offer a scene of ambivalent proximity historically in Johannesburg that help to tease out infrastructures of relationality infused with the seduction of Joburg noir. As such, they offer different registers for thinking through some of South Africa’s enervating frictions.  

Respondents: Ulrike Kistner, Prishani Naidoo and Sarah Nuttall
 

Bridget Kenny is a Professor of Sociology at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. She works on political subjectivity, gender, class and race in service work and precarious employment in South Africa and comparatively. Her books include Retail Worker Politics, Race and Consumption in South Africa: Shelved in the Service Economy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) and Wal-Mart in the Global South, co-edited with Carolina Bank Muñoz and Antonio Stecher (University of Texas Press, 2018).
 

Ulrike Kistner is Professor emerita in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Pretoria.

Prishani Naidoo is Director of SWOP and a member of the Wits Sociology Department

Sarah Nuttall is Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies at WISER

Thursday, 3^rd August 2023
6pm
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