As a resident of San Francisco or New York or indeed of any center of what Achille Mbembe calls “metropolitan modernity,� there is an immediate shock of recognition in reading about the elusive urbanity of Johannesburg (Nuttall and Mbembe 2004). The self-conscious styling of the self, the labyrinthine “webs of group af�liations� and “intersections of social circles� (the language is Georg Simmel’s), the neurasthenic, hypersensitive city condition, the grisly phenomenology of the urban lifeworld, motion and detachment, the city’s “psychologism� and “inner nature� (Simmel once again)—all of these things are deeply familiar to the scholar of metropolitan modernity. The shock, one might say, is in the extent to which Johannesburg has always aspired to, and now embodies, a distinctively modern aura: its zine culture, its metropolitan imaginings, its memorializations (the Freedom Charter in Kliptown and the Constitution Hill project on Hillbrow), the grotesque urban theaters of late capitalism (Melrose Arch and Montecasino), its psychic wounds and fugitive underground, its mysterious and shady crime syndicates. Central to this aura is the restless, glacial world of money and commodity exchange—the city dweller as customer, as Walter Benjamin once observed. This is Johannesburg in the eternalized present, as Simmel (1971) brilliantly described Berlin and Paris of a century ago. No surprise, then, that Johannesburg at the hands of its interlocutors should appear as a wildly heterogeneous (and divergent) set of fragments: psychotic and repressed; instant, un�nished, carceral, dangerous, and unforgiving; radically open and provisional; criminal and �lthy; afflicted; a site of desire and fantasy; a space of leakage. Jozi’s flaneur is the �gure of the migrant (Mbembe 2004)—or is it the diseased body of the AIDS sufferer (Le Marcis 2004)?

Johannesburg as a modern metropolis is consistent with two broad concerns flagged by Achille Mbembe and Sarah Nuttall (2004) in their introduction to “Johannesburg—The Elusive Metropolis,� a special issue of Public Culture. One is to interrogate Africa as a “sign in modern formations of knowledge�; the other is the task of writing about the “worldliness� of contemporary (in this case urban) life-forms. There is a discussion to be had on whether one can attribute Africa’s problematic otherness—as they do—to contemporary scholarship apparently bereft of novelty, originality, and (most provocatively) any willingness or ability to �nd “order . . . in the chaos of its present history.� The claim, for example, that Africa labors under the Tolstoyan burden of crude functionalism and instrumentalism (development studies and political economy are its standard-bearers) and the dead hand of “stolid analysis,� “rapid surveys,� “off-the-cuff remarks,� and “sensationalism� strikes me as a radically incomplete and actually a rather shoddy sort of genealogy. But this is for another time perhaps.1 Their point of departure—to defamiliarize the continent—is pointedly modernist (indeed, postmodernist). Uncertainty, turbulence, unpredictability, chronic shifts, and unanticipated innovations—Charles Baudelaire’s “mouvements brusques� and “the leaps and jolts of consciousness [soubresauts de conscience]� (cited in Berman 1988[1982]: 148)—serve as a basis for the African city’s sameness-as-worldliness, a claim that turns largely on seeing Africa fundamentally in a Castellian sense, as a space of flows, flux, motion, and connection (Castells 1996). One might say that writing the world from Africa, in this account, returns us to space, to the topographical imagination and the spatial entanglements of social form. In short, one returns once more to the classical theorists of city modernism (in this case, Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin). Of course, the editors read against the scholarship—a large and influential academic cottage industry—the social history of Johannesburg and South African settler capitalism, a complex �eld often held up as an exemplar of hard-edged political economy. Nuttall and Mbembe (2004) see Johannesburg as a city held (analytically) hostage precisely to this political economy: to a proletarian culture on the one side and to antiurbanism on the other (Charles van Onselen is, in their account, its avatar). Rather than privileging the city as a theater of capital—or a seedy, dystopian urban penitentiary—it is Johannesburg as a “site of fantasy, desire, and imagination� that runs across most of the essays, providing what the old Johannesburg literature does not apparently possess: theoretical rigor, comparative breadth, and a more encompassing political universe. It is for others to say whether these characterizations are entirely plausible—they appear caricatures on my read. What matters is the particular insight into the African city that superfluity, traumatic amnesia, people as infrastructure, matrices of trans�guration, and so on can bring to the lifeworld of Johannesburg, the “city of deconstructed images,� as Mbembe (2004: 404) calls it.