“CAN’T RELAX, BLACK”: PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY AND READING THE POST-RACIAL URBAN SPACE AS TEXT IN A GLOBAL MOMENT

Abstract

My thesis examines practices of psychogeography in tandem with Michel de Certeau’s theorisation of everyday life in The Practice of Everyday Life in order to elucidate how literary representations of urban spaces imagine the reality of the contemporary neoliberal city in this post-racial juncture. Reading the African postcolonial/post-apartheid city as represented in literary work, I seek in this thesis to analyse literary mappings of these urban city-spaces in the novels Portrait with Keys: A City of Johannesburg Unlocked (2006) by Ivan Vladislavi? and Open City (2011) by Teju Cole. By intertwining processes of reading and walking in the cityscape, I thus propose a psychogeographic reading of the city-as-text that invites an active and revelatory renegotiation with the postcolonial/post-apartheid city by revealing the continued existence of a racial ‘present past’ in these spaces. What this ‘present past’ reveals is the alienated condition of black Africans who remain suspended still in the throes of continued racial violence, encoded in our contemporary era within global structures of neoliberal class segregations and territorial security measures. As it considers the emancipatory and decolonial possibilities of psychogeography, this proposed study seeks to explore how such engagements may allow us to arrive at restorative ways of addressing and responding to these historical legacies of race that continue to remain obscured in the facade of a uniform global development. In doing so, this thesis aims to contribute to the ongoing critical discourse and theoreticisation of psychogeography’s methodological potentialities, whilst foregrounding the continued politics of race in an allegedly post-racial present.