Nostalgic Dystopia

Johannesburg as Landscape after White Writing

Bibliographic Data

ID20156530
AuthorsLandi Raubenheimer (0000-0002-3081-9151, University of Johannesburg, corresponding author)
Year2020
Volume36
Issue4
Pages123-142
Publication date2020-10-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Literary Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0256-4718 • E-ISSN: 1753-5387
PublisherUnisa Press (PUBLISHER • ZA)
DOI10.1080/02564718.2020.1822605
OpenAlexW3108410252
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited30

In 1988 J.M. Coetzee published White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa, formulating landscape as inherently entangled with problematic notions of white identity and belonging. Coetzee posits that white descendants of the Dutch and English colonists failed to find an appropriate “language” to represent the country’s landscape because they failed to establish an African identity. This crisis seems topical again with debates around land expropriation in the media, as well as #FeesMustFall considering questions of race and belonging. How is this reflected in contemporary landscape representation? By investigating the depiction of Johannesburg in the film District 9 (Blomkamp 2009), I aim to consider how landscape is seen as a contradictory nostalgic dystopia, reflecting the complexity of whiteness in relation to place in South Africa. The land itself bears the dystopian scars of the colonial mining industry, the geographic segregation of the apartheid regime, and the decay following the aftermath of so-called “white flight” in the inner city. At the same time, it is nostalgically depicted as the urban landscape of the 1980s, which for white people offered an illusory utopian lifestyle. Johannesburg in District 9 is thus a projection of white anxiety around land, hearkening back to Coetzee’s notion of disconnection between white South Africans and the landscapes of the country, and which seems to inspire an ironic nostalgia for a fictional past

Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · Colonialism · Depiction · Disconnection · Dystopia · Expropriation · Identity crisis · Literature · Political science · Politics · Social science · Sociology · African history and culture studies · African studies and sociopolitical issues · Gender Studies · History · Law · South African History and Culture

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