The city beyond the border

The urban worlds of Duiker, Mpe and Vera

Bibliographic Data

ID6030366
AuthorsM Samuelson (0000-0002-5070-1046, corresponding author)
Year2007
Volume5
Issue2
Pages247-260
Publication date2007-08-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueAfrican Identities (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1472-5843 • E-ISSN: 1472-5851
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/14725840701403523
OpenAlexW2034324741
LanguageEN
Citations received13
References cited14

The urban worlds of Sello Duiker, Phaswane Mpe and Yvonne Vera are ones in which a range of physical and conceptual borders are explosively visible yet rendered permeable. Focusing on fiction by these three recently deceased novelists, and tracing their urban worlds back to Drum magazine's inscriptions of the city in the 1950s, this article explores the emergence of an urban imagination that writes itself out of the binary structures characterizing discourses of the city in southern Africa. Among the borders that the three authors write beyond are those between urban and rural, and 'traditional' and 'modern', onto which binary structures gender difference has conventionally been mapped. Noting the ways in which women have been written out of city space, the article considers the extent to which gender shapes experiences and representations of the city and highlights the efforts of Duiker, Mpe and Vera to create imaginative space for women in the city. Finally, reading across the Limpopo River, the article transgresses the geo‐political borders that divide southern Africa and suggests the importance of doing so in literary and urban scholarship

Everyday life · Geography · Linguistics · Political science · Scholarship · Sociology · African history and culture studies · Gender Studies · History · Law · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies · South African History and Culture

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