‘Dispatcher took me places I was not meant to go’ – Embodied Placemaking in Mark Gevisser’s Lost and Found in Johannesburg: A Memoir
Keywords:
Mark Gevisser, Lost and Found in Johannesburg, A Memoir, embodied placemaking, emotional geographies, transgression, Johannesburg, memoirAbstract
This paper examines the connection between place and body in Mark Gevisser’s memoir Lost and Found in Johannesburg: A Memoir (2014) in order to inspire new ways of seeing the African city and its literary representations. The paper draws on embodied placemaking (Csordas 1999; Jones 2005; Kiverstein 2012; Sen and Silverman 2014), which focuses on the connection between body and place. The city’s apartheid past emerges particularly through the various transgressive acts described in the memoir which relate to the question of who belongs in a place. Gevisser’s attempts to map Johannesburg first in a childhood game and later in the memoir reveal the city’s many barriers and boundaries, both physical, social and psychological. The memoir negotiates anxieties of place in relation to personal and political history. A central event in the memoir is the home robbery of which Gevisser and his friends became victims, bringing together notions of emotional and normative geographies in one brutal act. The embodied emotional geographies of Johannesburg as presented by Gevisser suggest that its inhabitants make and remake its spatial futures while the city also retains an agency of its own.References
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