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- Title
Urbanity and Masculinity Construction in Moele's Room 207 and Mhlongo' Dog Eat Dog.
- Authors
Dlamini, Nonhlanhla
- Abstract
This paper thinks through Black South African urban masculinities as simultaneously created and located at the centres and margins of social and economic power. It grapples with the questions of self-writing, literary representations, and knowledge creation about citiness and identity creation in contemporary South Africa, Johannesburg. It seeks to interrogate and forge 'newer' strategies of narrating the gendered subject formation without essentialising the binaries of race, class, and sexuality while staging a difference that does not gloss over the various cultural seams that characterise the lived experiences of the Black South African youths living in Hillbrow and other peripheries of Johannesburg. This is achieved through a comparison and contrast of the apartheid fiction hustler and the contemporary hustler depicted in Kgebetli Moele' Room 207 and Mhlongo' Dog Eat Dog. I suggest that the novels proffer a nuanced depiction of gender and citiness that belies notions of Black youth' freedoms, upward class mobility, and hospitality that are celebrated as markers of contemporary Johannesburg while celebrating brazen city vice as part of the new political and social order. The novel's use of the street walker, realist modes of narration, wit, dry humour, and celebration of 'sin' and vice, grease, and grime of Hillbrow's underworld contribute to a Black literary tradition that contests various forms of exclusion whose basis is contemporary apartheid. The novel's contestation of the present through citiness and subjectivity creation is hinged on a backdrop of amnesia and suppressions of the past reinforced by rainbownism and the ideation of Mandela, which the Black youths have dislodged to mount a critique of the present through the #Fallist movements, whose precursors could be Moele and Mhlongo's literary works as they broach the themes of alienation through social and financial academic exclusions at the University of Witwatersrand and the University of Cape Town.
- Subjects
JOHANNESBURG (South Africa); BLACK South Africans; MASCULINITY; BLACK youth; RACE; SOCIAL alienation; INFLUENCE (Literary, artistic, etc.)
- Publication
African Journal of Gender, Society & Development, 2023, Vol 12, Issue 4, p35
- ISSN
2634-3614
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.31920/2634-3622/2023/v12n4a2