The Politics of Race in Bosman’s and Vladislavić’s Johannesburg

Abstract

South Africa’s socio-historical context is shaped by the country’s various phases of colonial domination: Dutch then British and finally, the institutionalisation of strict racial segregation through apartheid. This was followed by democratic governance from 1994 to the present day. Within postcolonial literary discourse, racism and its related practices of stereotyping and “othering” remain prominent themes. These concerns are especially pronounced in literary representations of Johannesburg, a city that has continually transformed alongside South Africa’s shifting political regimes, functioning as a critical site for the persistence and reconfiguration of racial ideology across historical periods. While existing scholarship on Herman Charles Bosman has largely focused on the immanent theme of racism mainly in his bushveld short stories, his city writings, with the exception of his novel, Willemsdorp, have received little critical attention. Addressing this gap, this study employs a postcolonial theoretical lens to offer a comparative analysis of how racialised perceptions shape urban experience in Johannesburg as depicted by two South African writers working in distinct yet connected historical moments: Bosman’s writing during the British dominion years of South Africa and into the early years of apartheid (1920–1951), and Ivan Vladislavić’s fiction published between 1996 and 2006. The diachronic comparison reveals the authors’ shared socio-political concerns, their yearning for transformation and demonstrates how racialised modes of seeing, entrenched during colonial and apartheid rule, persist despite the shift in South Africa’s political order.