Christine Giustizieri: "Up there: Reading the urban above in Ivan Vladislavić’s The Exploded View"

This presentation will discuss the literary urban space of the above in Ivan Vladislavić's novel The Exploded View (2004).

Johannesburg, the city of gold, is often associated with the hidden treasures which gave rise to its urban existence in the first place. Or, as Nuttall and Mbembe (2009:83) argue, it is the "intertwining of surface and depth" which defines the life of the Johannesburg. In this presentation, however, I would like to take a closer look at the literary representations of the urban above. I will close read and analyse what kind of denotations and connotations the above assumes in The Exploded View.

Christine Giustizieri studied English philology, Social Anthropology and History at the University of Basel. She graduated in 2003 writing her licentiate thesis on the 'Jim comes to Joburg' genre of twentieth century South African Literature.

Currently, she is completing her PhD project "Writing the city: Narratives of Johannesburg's Urban Space in Contemporary South African Literature" (working title), supervised by Prof. Therese Steffen (Department of English) and Prof. Patrick Harries (Department of History). Taking on an interdisciplinary as well as comparative approach, the dissertation project examines how urban space is created and which spaces and images are evoked in recent city literature. The research focuses in particular on the literary creation of Johannesburg’s urban space in the following novels: Ivan Vladislavic’s works The Restless Supermarket (2001), The Exploded View (2004), and Portrait with Keys: The City of Johannesburg Unlocked (2006) and on Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to our Hillbrow (2001), Kgebetli Moele’s Room 207 (2007) and Kevin Bloom’s Ways of Staying (2009). Christine's research and fieldwork in South Africa has been funded by the Swiss South African Joint Research Programme (SSAJRP) project "City in Flux".

From 2007 to 2011 she was assistant, student counselor and teaching staff at the Centre for African Studies Basel (CASB) and taught courses within the MA study course African Studies. Christine is member of the Kompetenzzentrum Kulturelle Topographien, of the Swiss Society for African Studies (SGAS) and is associated researcher of the Centre for African Studies Basel (CASB).