In this chapter I consider the rubric of entanglement from the vantage point of the city. More specifically, I focus on recent novels of Johannesburg, texts which take the city as one of their constitutive subjects rather than as a backdrop to their narratives. The chapter considers the following questions: What might a Johannesburg text be? How does Johannesburg emerge as an idea and a form in contemporary literatures of the city? What literary ‘infrastructures’ are giving the city imaginary shape? Which vocabularies of separation and connectedness surface and recede? What representational forms? Citiness in Johannesburg, as it emerges in the texts below, I will argue, is an intricate entanglement of éclat and sombreness, light and dark, comprehension and bewilderment, polis and necropolis, desegregation and resegregation. Several of the texts examined here are specifically concerned with questions of racial entanglement. Some, like Phaswane Mpe's Welcome to Our Hillbrow (2000), explore other forms of complexity and foreground epistemological instability.

The most influential body of work on the literary city in South Africa is that focusing on the emergence of Sophiatown and its writers. Sophiatown was the vibrant and racially fluid inner-city suburb of Johannesburg that flourished and then was forcibly removed in the 1950s. Its writers fired literary critical imaginations in new directions, capturing some of the multi-sidedness of Johannesburg's modernity, showing it to be a place occupied by the black poor, squatters and slum dwellers, and also a centre of urban black culture that, as Paul Gready (2002) has written, ‘offered unprecedented possibilities for blacks to choose and invent their society from the novel distractions of urban life’ (p 145).

Openly critical of liberalism, Sophiatown's writers, most of whom worked as journalists for Drum magazine, neither romanticised the rural nor condemned the moral degradation of the cities, contributing to a new tradition of writing which focused on black experience in the South African city. Much of their fiction tried to capture the racial landscape they inhabited: ‘the interracial frontier,’ writes Gready, ‘was fraught with contradictions and anguish, but while some like Themba later turned their back on it, others made their fictional and actual home in the quagmire of its tensions’ (p 148).