Negative Spaces: (Re-)Imagining Race and Blackness in Post-2000 South African Urban Narratives

Abstract

This study seeks to establish how black identity can be understood through post-2000 black authored South African city narratives. What motivates this inquiry is the understanding that black identity has been defined through negative perceptions since colonialism. The end of colonialism and apartheid marked a turning point in the South Africa history and literature as black people, began to re-define their identities. The study argues that, from colonialism and apartheid eras to the post-colonial period, blackness still poses as a negative space as it is consciously or unconsciously established around similar negative images that were formulated by the colonialists. My study is interested in inquiring whether, with the demise of apartheid, urban narratives have moved beyond colonial perspectives of representing black identity. As such, my focus is on how these black authored urban narratives present black urban dwellers and the city spaces that they occupy. The relations between black dwellers in urban spaces form a crucial point of departure considering how the meaning as it was constructed during apartheid has been sidelined to pave way for multiple meanings of that identity in post-apartheid South Africa. The study analyses blackness and South African cities as negative spaces that share consanguinity on the backdrop of murders, corruption, robberies, drug and alcohol abuse, and patriarchal oppression among others. Through such representations, the study argues that these spaces have become more precarious than during apartheid and the survival of most black people is not always guaranteed. Therefore, the study engages blackness through post-apartheid urban ambiguities, un-inhabitable city spaces, struggles to attain black entitlement within a country that is still defined by racism, urban negations and toxic masculinities that are constantly performed by post-apartheid young people.