Space, Mobility, and Belonging: Finding One’s Way Through Pre-Apartheid Johannesburg

This chapter focuses on (im)mobility to analyze asymmetrical patterns of power in the formation of collective identities in 1940s South African works of fiction, Cry, the Beloved Country by Paton (2002) and Mine Boy by Abrahams (1989). Recently, postcolonial literary criticism has increasingly employed mobility studies theories to inquire into the intricate ways in which people define themselves through mobility. The narratives analyzed here use (im)mobility as a spatializing practice to explore questions of (national) belonging. The novels negotiate complex spatial interrelations of racialized urban modernity but arrive at different ideas about nationhood despite their similar aesthetic strategies for representing (im)mobility. One anchors black people’s claim to a new South African nation in a reformed countryside, while the other highlights the importance of black urban modernity for a racially diverse new nation. The present analysis stresses that mobility is neither a positive act of resistance nor simply equitable with greater freedom, especially in the context of racialized and gendered discourses on idealized citizenship. (Im)mobility is at the core of negotiating spaces of belonging and integral to the imagination of a nation despite differences in class, race, and gender because it allows to imagine alternative discourses of belonging while maintaining other established notions of social order.