Ivan Vladislavic
Ivan Vladislavic
Traversing the Uneven City
This chapter offers a reading of the work of Ivan Vladislavic by way of demonstrating that its specific formal features capture the aura of a particular historical speace (Johannesburg) and time (the era of late or millennial capitalism) that nevertheless allows one to witness and reflect upon a general and global structure of feeling formed over the long duration of modernity’s unfolding. Read alongside incidents of occultism, witchcraft and trade in human organs in contemporary South Africa, Vladislavic's ‘anti-’ or ‘magic-’ realism points to the historical compulsion under which cultural modes operate in conditions of uneven development – the compulsion to fuse disparate idioms, languages, genres, and forms in order to meditate upon ordinary lives caught up in the dark magic of history. Vladislavic's thematic and formal concerns are interpreted as expressions of historical-material contraditions and paradoxes.
Keywords: Ivan Vladislavic, Johannesburg, Neoliberalism, Post-apartheid South Africa, Afropolitics, Portrait with Keys, Combined unevenness, Realism, Magic realism
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