ANXIOUS JOBURG, the inner lives of a Global South city

288pp., illus., maps, paperback, Johannesburg, 2020

Foreword by Sisonke Msimang. Afterword by Sarah Nuttall.

Contributions include:

"‘We are all in this together’: global citizen, violence and anxiety in Johannesburg" by Cobus van Staden

"‘It’s not nice to be poor in Joburg’: compensated relationships as social survival in the city" by Lebohang Masango

"‘The white centreline vanishes’: fragility and anxiety in the elusive metropolis" by Derek Hook

"Ugly Noo-noos and Suburban Nightmares" by Nicky Falkof

"The Unruly in the Anodyne: nature in gated communities" by Renugan Raidoo

"The Chinatown Back Room: the afterlife of apartheid architectures" by Mingwei Huang

"Photography and Religion in Anxious Joburg" by Joel Cabrita and Sabelo Mlangeni

"Marooned: seeking asylum as a transgender person in Johannesburg" by B Camminga

"Inner-city Anxieties: fear of crime, getting by and disconnected urban lives" by Aidan Mosselson.

"Anxiety might be terrifying, says Kierkegaard, but it speaks to the possibility of possibility. So, too, do the luminous, edgy essays assembled here, that make palpable the abrasive friction, the alchemy of abjection and ebullience, that drives Johannesburg’s creativity and its unlikely glamour." Professor Jean Comaroff, Harvard University

"Falkof and Van Staden have curated a remarkable academic collaboration, able to engage such a turbulent landscape with both intellectual acuity and tenderness."
Professor Abdoumaliq Simone, University of Sheffield

"In this most unequal city, what kind of constraints circumscribe our attempts to live an ‘authentic’ life? Whether interrogating the Global Citizen festival or traversing the city by taxi while female or just simply riding a bike … a luta continua!" Dr Melissa Tandiwe Myambo, editor of Reversing Urban Inequality in Johannesburg

Nicky Falkof is Associate Professor in Media Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand.

Cobus van Staden is a Senior Researcher at the South African Institute of International Affairs and is affiliated with the Department of Media Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand.