Borderlines...living on : the market and the post-apartheid polity in Mpe's Vladislavic's and Dangor's Johannesburg geographies

Abstract

OK Bazaars, Clicks, Spar, CNA and Checkers are the gaudy names of South African supermarkets which, in Phaswane Mpe’s classic ‘mapping’ of crime-­‐ridden Johannesburg in Welcome to Our Hillbrow (2001), mark the protagonist’s walk through inner-­‐city (WH 7-­‐8).1 The names of these supermarkets in Mpe’s text resonate evocatively with allusions to the putatively liberal spaces of the post-­‐segregation city of the early 1990s: ‘OK’ with a new but shortlived optimism, ‘Clicks’ with the African languages now to be heard on the streets of once-­‐whites-­‐only Hillbrow, ‘Bazaar’ with the influx of informal street economies into the once regimented grid of the CBD, or ‘Spar’ with the real austerities and exacerbated inequalities of the neoliberal regime which rapidly supplanted the ANC’s erstwhile imaginations of socialist egalitarianism.