Abstract
The article explores the literary significance of Johannesburg in the writing of Ivan Vladislavić in the context of recent debates about how to read the African city. In his most recent work, Portrait with Keys: The City of Johannesburg Unlocked (2006), Vladislavić opens his personal archive of everyday life in the city to imaginative reinterpretation by readers. To read Vladislavić's “portrait” is to imagine the city as a space that might be written, read and experienced differently – to imagine it as a possible city. The self‐reflexive nature of this project throws into critical relief recent calls to read Johannesburg as an “aesthetic project” rather than a “space of division” (Mbembe and Nuttall 353).
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