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1981
Volume 15, Issue 1
  • ISSN: 1754-9221
  • E-ISSN: 1754-923X

Abstract

Incidences of residential building hijacking which characterize post-apartheid Johannesburg have drawn debates from diverse fields of scholarship: anthropological, legal, social, literary and even cinema. Do they instantiate outright criminality, incomplete adjustment into the city, strategies for socio-economic restitution or acts of inverse racism? This article, an interdisciplinary probe into the representation of building hijacking in Ralph Ziman’s (2008), uses reductionism philosophy to theorize the practice as an actuation of eccentric post-apartheid culture. Three arguments follow. First, that culture after apartheid has shifted from collective to individual agency. Second, that building hijacking, a dimension of post-apartheid materiality, is a reliable metric of this cultural shift and a component of post-apartheid cultural semiology. And third, that a theory of this emergent post-apartheid culture can benefit from a reductive dialectic. The article concludes that reductionism is a usable critical frame to intercept contemporary nuances of individuated post-apartheid culture to which building hijacking is indexical.

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2024-04-19
2026-04-12

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Reductionism and post-apartheid culture: A critique of building hijacking in Gangsters Paradise: Jerusalema
Journal of African Cinemas 15, 37 (2023); https://doi.org/10.1386/jac_00088_1
/content/journals/10.1386/jac_00088_1
/content/journals/10.1386/jac_00088_1
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  • Article Type: Article
Keyword(s): Black; cinema; cultural semiotics; Gangsters Paradise: Jerusalema; Johannesburg; post-apartheid cinema; South Africa; South African cinema

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