Urbanism and Black Mobility in Peter Abrahams's Mine Boy

Abstract

This article reads representations of street movement in Peter Abrahams's novel Mine Boy (1946) in order to think through the novel's ideological tensions and their relation to urban space in pre-apartheid Johannesburg. I argue that modalities of movement in the fiction – walking, running, dancing – disclose the organisation of urban life by racist capitalism. Simultaneously, movement enables a shared humanity that transcends rigid categories of race or class. While Mine Boy's attempted synthesis of Marxism and liberal humanism generates a somewhat uneasy poetics, the strength of the work resides its ability to convey black communities' efforts to claim the city against discourses of segregation and exclusion deployed by the white state.