Ivan Vladislavić'sThe exploded view: space and place in transitional South Africa

Abstract

This essay discusses Ivan Vladislavić's The exploded view as a satirical text about the construction of space in post-1994 South Africa. The text consists of four sections, each of which foregrounds attempts to grapple with and represent various South African spaces, both literal and figurative. The census-taker in section one, the town-planner in section two, the trendy artist in section three and the philosophizing erector of billboards in section four all encounter the unstable quality of the material world which defies their efforts to define and limit it. All of these protagonists struggle to define space and place — whether inner or outer — in ways which bring satisfactory order and meaning to their lives. This essay takes the theoretical position that space is a construct underpinned by social and economic ideologies, and is given significant meaning only by a consciousness of the forces underlying its construction.

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