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9780199321902

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With an encyclopedic knowledge of Johannesburg, Kruger deftly navigates a tsunami of performances, speculations, and excavations that enable us to see how this city has lived across all of the histories, power games, and efforts to rein it in. Imagining the Edgy City deploys theater, literature, film, art, and photography to explore how all kinds of desires are materially etched into the city's fabric in an often uncanny interdependency of the dreamed and the built, and how this reciprocity absorbs a multitude of efforts in all of their unruly contradictions. -- AbdouMaliq Simone, author of For the City Yet to Come: Changing African Life in Four Cities Loren Kruger makes a compelling interdisciplinary argument for the centrality of performance and spatial practices in the history of Johannesburg. In terms of originality, I know of no other book that displays the stunning synthetic intelligence of Imagining the Edgy City. Readers will get a clear sense of the genealogy of boosterist Johannesburg and its exemplarity in relation to important and ongoing historiographic debates about imperial modernity, apartheid, and globalization. -- Neville Hoad, author of African Intimacies: Race, Homosexuality and Globalization Imagining the Edgy City contests two prevailing assumptions in accounts of Johannesburg: that the city's present is discontinuous with its past and that the segregation of its white and black inhabitants dominates every aspect of its evolution. Kruger's study unsettles the eschatology of the rise and fall of apartheid by sketching a chronology of broadly defined 'performances' of power, jurisdiction, sovereignty and their contestation in designated, informal and incidental spaces in the city. -- Michael Titlestad, author of Making the Changes: Jazz in South African Literature and Reportage Kruger's thoroughly researched, erudite, and confidently assertive book challenges the idea that definitions of modernity must se

With an encyclopedic knowledge of Johannesburg, Kruger deftly navigates a tsunami of performances, speculations, and excavations that enable us to see how this city has lived across all of the histories, power games, and efforts to rein it in. Imagining the Edgy City deploys theater, literature, film, art, and photography to explore how all kinds of desires are materially etched into the city's fabric in an often uncanny interdependency of the dreamed and the built, and how this reciprocity absorbs a multitude of efforts in all of their unruly contradictions. -- AbdouMaliq Simone, author of For the City Yet to Come: Changing African Life in Four Cities Loren Kruger makes a compelling interdisciplinary argument for the centrality of performance and spatial practices in the history of Johannesburg. In terms of originality, I know of no other book that displays the stunning synthetic intelligence of Imagining the Edgy City. Readers will get a clear sense of the genealogy of boosterist Johannesburg and its exemplarity in relation to important and ongoing historiographic debates about imperial modernity, apartheid, and globalization. -- Neville Hoad, author of African Intimacies: Race, Homosexuality and Globalization Imagining the Edgy City contests two prevailing assumptions in accounts of Johannesburg: that the city's present is discontinuous with its past and that the segregation of its white and black inhabitants dominates every aspect of its evolution. Kruger's study unsettles the eschatology of the rise and fall of apartheid by sketching a chronology of broadly defined 'performances' of power, jurisdiction, sovereignty and their contestation in designated, informal and incidental spaces in the city. -- Michael Titlestad, author of Making the Changes: Jazz in South African Literature and Reportage Kruger's thoroughly researched, erudite, and confidently assertive book challenges the idea that definitions of modernity must self-evidently be defined from out of the north by describing Johannesburg's long history of modernist aspiration and the ways in which this is reflected through an impressive array of imaginative practices. -- Mark Fleishman, University of Cape Town An extraordinary amalgam of histories and geographies, destruction and integration, Loren Kruger's outstanding book brings to life South Africa's largest city. Imagining the Edgy City is an indispensable contribution to urban studies that will resonate far beyond Johannesburg. --Saskia Sassen, author of Cities in a World Economy Dazzling... A book with something for everyone. Academics across a range of disciplines (literary and cultural studies, media studies, urban studies and town planning) will find much to delight them. Secondary school educators who have to teach anything on Johannesburg or cities will find inspiration in this volume. Any lay readers who have ever loved or loathed Jozi will find something that resonates with their experience. --Isabel Hofmeyr, author of South Africa and India: Shaping the Global South

With an encyclopedic knowledge of Johannesburg, Kruger deftly navigates a tsunami of performances, speculations, and excavations that enable us to see how this city has lived across all of the histories, power games, and efforts to rein it in. Imagining the Edgy City deploys theater, literature, film, art, and photography to explore how all kinds of desires are materially etched into the city's fabric in an often uncanny interdependency of the dreamed and the built, and how this reciprocity absorbs a multitude of efforts in all of their unruly contradictions. AbdouMaliq Simone, author of For the City Yet to Come: Changing African Life in Four Cities

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Loren Kruger is Professor of Comparative and English Literature, and an affiliate of the Urban Network at the University of Chicago. Her previous books include The Drama of South Africa and Post-Imperial Brecht, winner of the Scaglione prize for Comparative Literary Study awarded by the Modern Language Association.

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