Book discussion | ANXIOUS JOBURG - The Inner Lives of a Global South City Edited by Nicky
WiSER and Wits University Press invite you to a book discussion
ANXIOUS JOBURG
The Inner Lives of a Global South City
Edited by Nicky Falkof and Cobus van Staden
Speaker : Abdoumaliq Simone
With responses from the editors and contributors
Convened by Tinashe Mushakavanhu (WISER).
Anxious Joburg focuses on Johannesburg, the largest and wealthiest city in South Africa, as a case study for the contemporary global south city. Such cities are often imagined in terms of the global north’s anxieties about the south as a source of migration, crime, terrorism, disease and environmental crisis. Anxious Joburg invites readers to, instead, consider an intimate perspective of living inside such a city. How does it feel to live in the anxious metropolis of Johannesburg? What are the conditions, intersections, affects and experiences that mark the contemporary urban? From peripheral settlements and the inner city to the affluent northern suburbs, from precarious migrants and domestic workers to upwardly mobile young women and fearful elites, Anxious Joburg presents an absorbing engagement with this frustrating, dangerous, seductive city, and emphasises the way in which anxiety is a vital structuring principle of contemporary urban life.
Abdoumaliq Simone is a globally recognised urbanist and the author of many major books including For the City Yet To Come: Urban Change in Four African Cities (Duke, 2004); City Life from Jakarta to Dakar (Routledge, 2009); Drawing the City Near (Minnesota, 2014); New Urban Worlds: Inhabiting Dissonant Times, with Edgar Pieterse ((Polity, 2017) and Improvised Lives: Rhythms of Endurance in an Urban South (Polity, 2018).
Nicky Falkof is an Associate Professor in the Media Studies department at Wits. She is the author of The End of Whiteness: Satanism and Family Murder in Late Apartheid South Africa (Palgrave/Jacana, 2015).
Cobus van Staden is a senior researcher focusing on Africa-China relations at the South African Institute of International Affairs (SAIIA), and a visiting lecturer at the Wits Media Studies department. His work focuses on the overlap between geopolitics and media in the global south.
Tinashe Mushakavanhu holds a PhD in English from the University of Kent and is a Fellow at WISER. His most recent book is Reincarnating Marechera: Notes on a Speculative Archive (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2020).
Wednesday, 28th October 2020
6pm
Register in advance https://wits-za.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJMscOuoqj8iGddyBbnoBKqFMGdr_5XWazqi