ABSTRACT
Addressing the postsecular poetics of urban spaces, this chapter illustrates how the sacred is integrated into the narrative and form of Nigerian-American Teju Cole’s Open City (2011), and Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow (2001), and Ivan Vladislavić’s Portrait with Keys (2006), both South African writers. The first two novels illustrate the incorporation of African epistemologies into the postsecular, postcolonial city, while the third is structured as a ritualised resignification of Johannesburg. These novels marvel at the possibilities of urban pedestrian access, while representing the precarious position of the subject in the globalised city. Traversing, naming and mapping the territory that has been covered as they walk and integrating sacred knowledge systems in the city, the protagonists of these texts assert a hard-won knowledge of the streets, establishing a point of identification and belonging in the otherwise sprawling, anonymous mass of the city – a process called pedestrian mapping. Moving beyond the detached voyeur of Benjamin’s and de Certeau’s flâneur, the chapter exposes the narrator-protagonists’ productive strategies of belonging through the incorporation of African epistemologies and ritualised behaviour into the seemingly public, secular urban environment.
