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This article considers protest poetry written between 1961 and 1976. I argue that the Soweto poetry of the 1970s enabled activism that would change Johannesburg’s landscape, facilitating the racial mixing of inner city areas and eroding the segregationist policies that had defined the city from its beginnings. Concomitantly, the paper focuses on representations of the train as a site through which black localities were produced as resistance. Via close readings of poetry by Mbuyiseni Oswald Mtshali, Sipho Sepamla, and Mongane Wally Serote, I show how the train establishes Soweto as a “neighbourhood”, while also constructing a white “other” against which its identity is affirmed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper limns modes of consumption and wastefulness in recent South African fiction about the township. It draws upon moves of aspiration and carelessness articulated in the youth practice i’khothane to think through the ways in which conspicuous destruction around car-use maps onto township socialities. Accordingly, it compares Sifiso Mzobe’s Young Blood and David Dinwoodie-Irving’s African Cookboy as texts utilizing scenes of consumption and destruction with a variety of effects. While commodity ownership and disposal enunciate identities that can unsettle the status quo, the article argues that aspiration alone cannot provide resources with which to shift structural inequalities persisting in South African cities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

There is a substantial corpus of criticism on the epistemology of walking in recent writing by Ivan Vladislavic. This article expands upon the literature through a focus on the ways in which The Exploded View and Portrait with Keys engage with and pressurise the socio-spatial dominance of car driving in Johannesburg. It maintains that while car-use radically organises space and place in the city, this hegemony is tested by alternate forms of mobility. As Vladislavic’s work suggests, disorderly and apparently liminal urban modalities and movements disrupt orderly expressions of urban capital aligned with car-driving. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]