Reductionism and post-apartheid culture: A critique of building hijacking in Gangsters Paradise: Jerusalema

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 Gangsters Paradise: Jerusalema (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.