1.1 More than a Feeling

How can ruins such as those in District 9 and in District Six in Goldblatt’s photograph be understood as landscapes? And could these be interpreted as sublime landscapes of some kind? Trigg (2006: 95–118) writes about post-industrial ruins in relation to traditions of apprehending ruination in aesthetics. He refers to the history of the representation of ruins in art, and post-industrial ruins in relation to this tradition, situating ruins in opposition to the development of rational thinking and the importance of reason in western urban planning from the Enlightenment onwards.⁴ For him, ruination and ruins subvert the role of reason in society, and thus serve a critical purpose.

Although some of the spaces I look at are urban or peri-urban rather than strictly post-industrial, I use the term post-industrial ruins throughout this chapter. The implicit umbrella of post-apartheid ruins applies to them all, since these urban landscapes have their foundations in apartheid spatial planning, which espoused modernist planning ideals, as did industrial architecture. These spaces have in common a collapse of such ordering principles because of their ruination. Urban ruins share much with scholars’ descriptions of post-industrial ruins. These spaces are in the process of decay: they are not resolved and they do not lend themselves to a classical interpretation of ruination.

For Trigg, post-industrial ruins are useful in an aesthetic sense, not because they will further decay, but because they are complete in their incompleteness (Trigg 2006: xxi–xxix). Andreas Huyssen (2006: 15) refers to a sense of a lack of closure or wholeness in some representations of ruins. This lack of closure is what interests me in the prevalence of images of ruins and ruination in Johannesburg’s contemporary place-image. What is the aesthetic usefulness or critical potential of this seemingly unresolved image of the city?

Leading up to his discussion of the post-industrial sublime, Trigg cites examples of ruins that function in a relatively straightforward manner. These are historical portrayals of classical ruins, such as the ancient Roman theatre of Marcellus, and the village of Ninfa in Italy, examples that provide the viewer or visitor with a pleasurable aesthetic experience (Trigg 2006: 144–145). Because the ruins are so ancient and seem stagnant in time, they have an air of finality and closure, and therefore can be apprehended coherently and understood as unchanging. This is the kind of depiction of ruins that Huyssen (2006: 14) describes as picturesque in character, while Joanna Zylinska (2017: 86) refers to it as romantic. Such representations are in the tradition of ruins in a landscape that probably dates back to a woodcut from 1499 entitled the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (Murray 1971: 17). These representations inspired the vedute etchings made famous by Giovanni Battista Piranesi in the eighteenth century, depicting the ruins of Rome for tourist souvenirs.⁵

In their romantic approach to ruins, portrayals like these may evoke a sense of nostalgia in the viewer, which may not be productive because they do not encourage a critical interpretation. Trigg (2006: 53–65) is doubtful about the aesthetic usefulness of nostalgia in the context of ruins, arguing that longing for the past is often related to the uncritical valorisation of progress. For Trigg, this is not a contradiction: our reliance on memory of the past is related to considering time and progress as linear and necessarily progressive; such reliance relates to the Enlightenment notion that remembering the past will allow one to develop and improve upon it, and thus supports modernist notions of progress. Nostalgia is often understood as a longing for a return to past order or reason perceived to have been lost. In these portrayals, it may point to a valorisation of ancient civilisations such as the Roman Empire. Nostalgia is also a function of a site becoming a place, when people confer meaning on it over time, creating a place-image (Shields 1991). When such a past becomes a fixed point of reference, it loses its potential to destabilise the narrative of reason, because it becomes static, quantifiable, and part of the narrative. As with the vedute etchings, this may lead to a complacent viewing experience. However, Boym (2001), discussed earlier, offers a more complex interpretation of nostalgia than Trigg, and I too would argue that not all forms of nostalgia are as simple as a longing for the past. Huyssen’s (2006: 12–13) discussion of nostalgia in relation to the notion of authenticity is instructive in this regard. For him, nostalgia as brought about by images of ruins, such as those of past empires, does more than express fantasies of domination and of power. Rather, ruins serve to articulate an awareness of the transitory character of human power, and the Enlightenment fear that all human history might ultimately be wiped out by nature. An uneasy experience of urban ruins does not preclude nostalgia, which can be more complex than a simple valorisation of an edified past.

Piranesi’s work did not only depict static and pleasing ruins; he later moved beyond such popular conventions when he produced the series Antichità Romane in 1756. In these etchings, his depictions become very dramatic and romantic, and can indeed be termed sublime, as in his etching of the Foundations of the Mausoleum of Hadrian.

In this work, tiny figures in the foreground convey the immensity of the ruins and, even though the masonry is decaying, it seems impressive, sturdy and monumental because of the low viewpoint and strong chiaroscuro (Murray 1971: 46–47). There is something seemingly eternal about these ruins. Human time seems folly by comparison, as is emphasised by the ant-like figures in the image. The apparent stability of these monumental ruins engenders a pleasurable sensation in the viewer, although there is also threat embodied in their scale. Huyssen (2006) discusses Piranesi’s Carceri d’Invenzione (imaginary prisons) as depictions that further defy picturesque interpretations, and push the notion of unpresentableness even further than his sublime Roman ruins.⁶ Huyssen (2006: 13–20) proposes that they share some conceptual underpinnings with Adorno’s interpretation of avant-garde art, such as a denial of cohesion and wholeness, which can nudge the spectator to a place of critical contemplation rather than mere visual consumption or pleasure.

One might recall Goldblatt’s photograph of tiny figures inhabiting shacks on a mine dump (Figure 15) in relation to Piranesi’s depictions. But Goldblatt’s landscape evokes no sense of grandeur. Rather, the setting seems unremarkable and mundane, capturing the matter-of-fact existence of people who appear to be making do with what little they have in an unforgiving context.

Like the Carceri in Huyssen’s interpretation, however, post-industrial ruins such as the mine dumps in Goldblatt’s photograph have a destabilising effect on the viewer in Trigg’s estimation. Rather than presenting a sense of human grandeur and power, they evoke a sense of the folly of modernity’s exploits. Post-industrial sites are often still undergoing decay, and thus seem ambiguous in temporal terms. There is no sense of closure for the viewer, as such ruins point to transience rather than a sense of arrested time. As a result, they may inspire repulsion instead of pleasure; in Trigg’s view, they are more ontologically significant than classical ruins. He sees post-industrial ruins as more akin to the sublime, and classical ruins to the beautiful, following Burke’s formulation (Trigg 2006: 147–148). He goes on to describe how the Kantian triumph of reason over the senses often cannot take place, as the indeterminacy of time, sense of place and form in such ruins precludes such resolution. For him, much as for Brook (2012), such ruins are uncanny rather than only sublime, in the sense that nature is no longer under control of the senses of the observer. Nature returns as a familiar yet unfamiliar entity in the fauna and flora that reclaim these sites, asserting its dominance over human reason. There is thus an unsettling yet affirming aesthetic effect in such ruins. In terms of their affective qualities, post-industrial images such as Goldblatt’s seem to represent “cultural pessimism”, or a contemporary condition of apathy and disillusionment brought on by a loss of faith in the narrative of progress (Trigg 2006: 116).⁷ This pessimism is often linked to gratuitous consumption in post-capitalist society, which may indicate a culture in decline (Trigg 2006: 119–125).

Post-industrial ruins may also relate to urban anxiety due to the collapse of “platial” boundaries, which Paul Virilio discusses in relation to contemporary urban space (in Trigg 2006: 126).⁸ This is because capitalism bestows sameness and uniformity upon all places, an aspect exacerbated by digital media and its cultures.⁹ The city becomes a place of desolation, indeterminacy and ambiguity (Trigg 2006: 131) when it is abandoned or ruined, and the order that was imposed by it is erased.

With regard to Johannesburg, anxiety takes on additional meaning because of the city’s politically volatile history. Here ruination is often related to the collapse of apartheid, as the former regime’s physical and institutional edifices collapse. During the 1980s, Johannesburg was already moving towards decentralisation, with the inner city in decline and the development of shopping malls and business districts outside this area (Brodie 2008). By the 1990s, many buildings were unoccupied and beginning to be reclaimed by the poor. Nechama Brodie (2008:97) explains how opportunistic landlords would illegally rent out space in buildings, taking advantage of desperate tenants, and creating slums in buildings that had not been maintained for many years and were unsafe to inhabit. Since the early 2000s, the Johannesburg City Council has been working with the Johannesburg Development Agency to turn this situation around and renew the decaying cbd, but this has resulted in other challenges, such as pockets of gentrified developments amid very poor and decayed parts of the city. One such area is the notorious Hillbrow, which was once the pinnacle of the apartheid-era’s aspirational inner-city architecture. After the end of the apartheid-era it changed radically, as white residents and businesses abandoned the area.

1.2 Hillbrow: A New Jerusalem

The phenomenon of white flight, along with the growing incidence of slums in Hillbrow, is central to the film Gangster’s Paradise: Jerusalema. The film is discussed with reference to how it portrays this part of the city by many scholars. Alexandra Parker (2018) refers to how Hillbrow may be compared to an American gangster film “ghetto”, or seen as a “fallen city on a hill” (Lehman 2011: 113). Although he takes a more optimistic view, Addamms Mututa (2020) describes its urban qualities as errant, referring to dilapidation and trash. In Gangster’s Paradise: Jerusalema, the protagonist, taxi-driver Lucky Kunene, starts a business run through the Hillbrow People’s Housing Trust, which in his words would “take […] back the streets, building by building”. The scheme involves tenants taking over the rent in bad buildings and holding landlords – the building owners – to ransom, on conditions such as improving the facilities. This premise is not pure fiction. Ziman attests to how reading about such events inspired the plot of the film (Ziman Steals the Screen 2008). Such reported practices are what Mututa (2020: 218) refers to as “errant” gentrification, where (often white) landlords are in effect circumvented, and residents take control of buildings by means that are legally dubious, but which may ultimately lead to an improvement of living conditions.

By these means, Lucky soon becomes very wealthy, and the plot develops further from that basis. But what is of interest here is how Gangster’s Paradise: Jerusalema depicts Hillbrow itself. Like District 9 and many related portrayals of Johannesburg as nostalgic dystopia, the film constructs its portrayal of urban slums in a manner that evokes documentary films, such as The Battle for Johannesburg, and documentary photography of the time.

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Lucky’s taxi in front of Dunvista Mansions. Still taken from Gangster’s Paradise: Jerusalema (Ralph Ziman, 2008).

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In the screenshot in Figure 47, a sequence in the second act that Mututa (2020) also writes about, Ziman has selected a low-angle shot, to give prominence to the garbage accumulated outside Lucky’s Hillbrow abode (a building called Dunvista Mansions) throughout the film. There are signs of urban decay in the peeling paint on the building on the left, and the minibus taxi is itself the worse for wear. The Hillbrow Tower lurks in the background, becoming a minor character in the film, stepping in as a point of reference, but also appearing in moments of crisis, when Lucky stares out of his window at the view of this once impressive structure (Figure 48).

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Lucky staring out of the window. Still taken from Gangster’s Paradise: Jerusalema (Ralph Ziman, 2008).

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The feeling of grime is tangible, and pervades the Hillbrow setting of Gangster’s Paradise: Jerusalema, which, corresponding to its generic agenda as a gangster film, foregrounds the dystopian qualities of Dunvista Mansions and its surrounds. Johannesburg takes on a noir quality in many shots of the cityscape which emphasise darkness, smog and the spectre of lawlessness hanging over it. In the screenshot in Figure 48 one can see the glow on the horizon as the city lights are reflected in the urban pollution. Lucky gazes through the open windows, which have not been cleaned in a long time, and the inside frames are grimy, as if the pollution has permeated the inner spaces of the building. Shots like this, which occur several times throughout the film, suggest that Lucky is not beyond hope, however. When he stares up at the Hillbrow Tower there is the suggestion that he still dreams of bigger things, despite his gloomy circumstances. Hillbrow, though dystopian, is the setting of Lucky’s success and his transformation into a middle-class citizen.

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Trash and a police vehicle. Still taken from Gangster’s Paradise: Jerusalema (Ralph Ziman, 2008).

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In some sequences, there is a focus on the decay, perhaps the errancy that Mututa (2020) refers to in his discussion of the film. Shots such as the one showing a police vehicle parked beyond a pile of trash (Figure 49) emphasise the dire state of Hillbrow, with the armoured vehicle implying how rife violent crime is. The garbage in the foreground seems to be growing out of control, and the asphalt is falling apart. The scene depicts an urban landscape of ruination, no longer resembling anything functional. In places, the plastic debris, unidentifiable for the most part, has melted into the remains of the road, as if fires had been burning here, outside in the street. Opposite are buildings that appear to be residences, which point to a time when this locale functioned as a suburban street and was not an unconstrained site of litter and fires in makeshift braziers. The blurring of boundaries between activities indicates the collapse of order ubiquitous in the Hillbrow of Gangster’s Paradise: Jerusalema. Informal trade and private activities, such as cooking dinner or socialising, all merge in spaces not designed for these activities, which Abdoumaliq Simone (2004: 1) suggests is characteristic of African cities, where improvisation and seizing unplanned opportunities is critical to survival in the urban context.¹⁰ In effect, this changes the urban landscape and breaks it down into more fundamental elements from a material point of view. The breakdown and decay of both architectural structures and domestic waste seem to be part of this process.

In Emilie Venables’ (2011: 133) socio-medical research on Hillbrow, there are photographs taken by the participants in her study that draw attention to the lack of waste removal services in the area. In them, men can be seen ankle-deep in garbage bags during a municipal strike, and they narrate how service delivery is an ongoing problem in the neighbourhood. Documentation of such waste is also prominent in photographs by Jono Wood and Guy Tillim, as well as documentary photography that engages with waste removers themselves, such as Sabelo Mlangeni’s Invisible Women, 2007 series and photographs by Mark Lewis (2015) who documented waste recyclers working in Johannesburg.

1.3 Ponte City

The physical decay of Johannesburg and its apartheid legacy is ironic, as the collapse of apartheid should have resulted in citizens’ freedoms and a more egalitarian social structure. Instead, it has resulted in abandoned sections of the city, where those in poverty live in urban ruins.¹¹ As in many such spaces in the world, in the town of Nala Sopara in Mumbai (see Mukherjee 2017: 287–309), Douala in Cameroon, or Bangkok in Thailand (see Simone 2010: 263–334), for example, many buildings in the inner city of Johannesburg are collapsing but are not empty. As depicted in Gangster’s Paradise: Jerusalema, there is vibrant life often invisible to middle-class citizens. Such resilient life is laid bare in Subotzky and Waterhouse’s project documenting Ponte City. Instead of only showing it as a landmark on the Johannesburg skyline, the two photographers documented people’s windows and television screens, and took many portraits of the building’s residents over several years, capturing a human angle of the building. However, they devote considerable attention to ruined structures and debris in the atrium of the building as well.

Subotsky’s photograph in Figure 17, though documentary in approach, is notable for capturing the scale of the rubble in this building, and presents a different view of Ponte. Although the building is still impressive on the contemporary Johannesburg skyline, on closer viewing, the scale of its decay overshadows its presence there. Although Subotzky and Waterhouse’s project focused on the resilience and humanity of residents, the attributes of the building itself feature just as much. The project points to the post-apartheid built environment of Johannesburg more generally, with its qualities of urban ruin, which in Figure 17 seem to dwarf the human workers engaged in cleaning Ponte. When considering this photograph from the point of view of the site, perhaps as a landscape of sorts, its imbrication with the post-industrial sublime can be supplemented by what Miles Orvell terms the “destructive sublime” (2013: 647–671). He discusses this concept in relation to photography of sites of urban destruction in the United States. These include Detroit, an industrial city that has been decaying over time,¹² as well as sites of natural destruction, such as New Orleans, which was devastated by Hurricane Katrina, and of politically motivated destruction, such as New York in the wake of the attack on the World Trade Centre in 2001.

In the destructive sublime, decay itself becomes a decisive factor in how the sublime manifests through representations. Orvell (2013: 647) focuses particularly on the contradictory affects that such photographs may elicit in the viewer, namely, feelings of grief and loss, but also an aesthetic pleasure, which may in turn be unsettling. Orvell (2013: 670) suggests that there is an aspect of fascination for viewers in photographs that one could label “ruin porn”. The discomfort that sites of urban disaster in the United States may hold for viewers could be akin to what viewers of dystopian depictions of Johannesburg experience. In beholding a moment of decay and devastation related to the city’s political circumstance, they experience ambiguities of place such as a nostalgic dystopia. Ponte City may evoke such contradictory responses.

The socio-political position of viewers is formative in how they experience such portrayals. Who would experience nostalgia in seeing these images, for example? Desai, director of The Battle for Johannesburg – who overtly positions himself as a middle-class citizen and an outsider to spaces of urban ruination such as these – reminisces about how Hillbrow used to look when he was younger. He states in his film that it has “gone downhill”. His racial heritage complicates Desai’s position: as an Indian man who grew up in exile, he would only have known Hillbrow during the demise of apartheid, shortly after his return to South Africa in the 1990s, and his feelings of nostalgia must be based on that. His parents, on the other hand, who would not have frequented Hillbrow at night in their youth, as it was off-limits to Indian people under apartheid law,¹³ would be unlikely to view it nostalgically, in the way white citizens of that generation might feel.

Ruined or decaying buildings such as Ponte City are also complicated by another factor, which Orvell (2013: 648) relates to Alois Riegl’s 1903 discussion of monuments – what he calls “age value” in ruined or decaying buildings. Riegl argues that, within the cultural understanding of ruins in Europe in the early twentieth century, “age value” is ascribed to things that deteriorate slowly, at a pace that aligns with “nature” (Riegl 1996: 73), and not those that are subject to violent and sudden destruction. For him, age value lies in imperfections that creep in over time, making the structure seem incomplete or fragmented. Such a notion of ruins resembles how scholars discuss analogue nostalgia as a valorisation of the imperfections of ageing analogue media recouped in digital media.¹⁴ It may also recall Benjamin’s notion of the aura of authenticity, which regards historicity, the passing of time and the distance from an object as contributing to its sense of authenticity. Huyssen (2006) relates this to ruins.

Age value, in a way similar to Trigg’s (2006) view of classical ruins, accrues when decay takes place slowly. There is a point, however, when total decay undermines the pleasure of age value, when a ruin becomes unintelligible: structure has given way to chaos or formlessness. Riegl (1996: 74) points out that a mere pile of stones will no longer afford aesthetic pleasure. The post-industrial sublime functions more effectively in this register, where urban structure surrenders to the “chaos” of nature (Trigg 2006). The post-industrial sublime can only truly unfold when one can no longer romanticise a ruin. In photographs of Ponte City (Figure 17), architectural reason is no longer at work but is completely subverted. The mountain of debris epitomises a descent into chaos: it looks more like a (mining) landscape than the interior of an atrium or any other architectural form. In 1903, Riegl (1996: 74) used the word “formless” to describe such decay, prefiguring Bois and Krauss’ (1997) use of the term. I consider this an important guiding principle when exploring the sublime in depictions of Johannesburg. It lurks not only in shapeless mine waste areas, but also – perhaps surprisingly – in the city’s decaying buildings, which threaten to undermine the urban fabric of historic Johannesburg.

Victor Burgin (1991: 22–23) discusses Julia Kristeva’s concept of the abject in relation to the sublime, proposing that the way the female body is seen as abject could sometimes be projected onto sublime landscapes.¹⁵ Burgin argues that the affective response to fearsome landscapes conceals the fear of extinction of identity in the loss of the boundaries of subjectivity. He quotes Klaus Theweleit, who talks about the landscape subsuming one’s body, dissolving it, until one is “in a state where everything is the same, inextricably mixed together” (Burgin 1991: 22). In the screenshot of Wikus crawling in the dust in District 9 (Figure 45c), it is precisely such a dissolution that occurs. His body is disintegrating and re-forming itself as an alien body, but at that point he is neither one nor the other. In the disintegrating landscape, he almost looks like another piece of rubble. Burgin suggests that the force at work in such a dynamic is entropy – a topic covered also by a chapter in Bois and Krauss’ (1997) book. While the grotesque, the abject, the informe or formless and the sublime are distinct categories of aesthetic experience that could be analysed theoretically in considerably more detail than I can here, it is worth noting where they overlap, and where they inform each other in District 9.¹⁶ If the landscape in the film is formless, evoking the sublime of post-industrial decay and destruction, then the abject and grotesque qualities of the characters in the film, like the ‘prawns’ and Wikus’s mutating body, are fitting inhabitants.¹⁷

The concept of the formless is the collapse of dichotomies, the collapse of figure and ground.¹⁸ In the photograph of Ponte City, the ‘figure’ (form) of the building has been slowly collapsing into the ‘ground’, subsumed in decay and uniformity, until things approximate the inextricably mixed matrix that Burgin (1991: 22) refers to: it seems as if trash and the building may become indistinguishable at some point. Arya (2014: 7) suggests that if the sublime is an experience that leads to a transcendence of the body and the senses, then the abject casts one down into horror and disgust in a process of desublimation. The formless could also work in this manner, since it shares with the abject a collapse of boundaries and a devolution into homogenising chaos, no longer distinguishing different forms of materiality. The horror and disgust one may feel in response to these images has the added aspect of moral concern (Orvell 2013: 647–671). One may simultaneously feel empathy for people who live in such appalling conditions and experience a morbid fascination because such photographs are so compelling to look at.

1.4 Considering Entropy

What is the significance of the fascination of these places? Clearly they deny the viewer the sense of triumph articulated in theories of classical ruins as sublime. These images are simply too real to allow one to have such an abstract response. Does the formless quality of these cityscapes then allow the viewer some sense of agency or transformation in response to these depictions? The collapse of order and form runs contrary to modernist urban planning and the sameness imprinted upon much modernist urban space under capitalist regimes, as is evident in mass housing, for example.¹⁹ In the South African context, although these sites are negative in terms of extreme decay, filth and poverty, they also represent the decay of an oppressive political regime of separation and modernist urban hegemony. In writing about such decay in the film Gangster’s Paradise: Jerusalema, Mututa (2020: 212) argues that this errancy, which I call entropy, is a form of “aggressive customization”. For him, the city is continuously unfolding in the present, its future uncertain; the city is “emblematic of hope, yet experienced as gloom” (216). In this sense, these spaces may hold an element of critical potential, however unlikely it may seem at face value. Of course, a difficult yet prudent question to ask is for whom that freedom is available. In Gangster’s Paradise: Jerusalema, it is the residents themselves who turn this state of decay around and to their advantage (such as it is) through the customisation of how their buildings are run. Parker (2018: 66) points out, however, that the film could be seen as an outsider perspective on inner-city life in Johannesburg, made by a white filmmaker, who portrays Hillbrow from his perspective. The same may be said of District 9. The reality portrayed in the documentary The Battle for Johannesburg is bleaker: only a handful of residents of a bad building secure better accommodation from the city council, when their original residence (San Jose) is renovated for higher income tenants. They seem to remain at the mercy of this entropic process rather than at the helm of it.

Then again, one might think of these depictions as portraying a radical reversion to organic disorder. While the images are often shocking, inspiring repulsion, they demonstrate human survival against the odds. A viewer might not be able to imagine living in such conditions, but some people do so daily, as is portrayed in The Battle for Johannesburg. In South Africa, the realisation that this is not as far removed (geographically speaking) from a middle-class life as some might think brings home the reality of social stratification and poverty in the country. It also serves to highlight the position of the viewer. Repulsion as an affect can be useful in this context. Such a response could be more productive for the viewer than pleasant feelings of delight evoked by ruins presented as picturesque landscapes of past grandeur (Trigg 2006: 146–148). A feeling of repulsion is closer to an experience of space as sublime, where the viewer is challenged rather than placated. This sublime signifies a rupture with reason and structure, where progress itself is questioned, and space becomes contingent (or indeed formless) rather than rational. This is the unpresentable, the denial of “good forms” (Lyotard 1984b: 81).²⁰

One might further speculate that such a rupture would constitute a shock, or a form of violence exerted through or upon the viewer, as Lyotard (1984a) formulated in his theory of the avant-garde and the sublime. Although Lyotard was writing about art, in the context of urban landscape one might consider that this contradictory affective aesthetic approximates a truer version of such a rupture than artworks ever could. This undoubtedly has ethical implications, especially since the photographs depict actual living conditions that people contend with. The problematic nature of this critical or aesthetic potential should be interrogated, but its character should first be thoroughly probed.

As Trigg (2006: 95) suggests, decay in the post-industrial context seems to have ontological significance, indicating the loss of a bygone worldview, that no longer aligns with lived experience. This could not be more obviously the case than in the post-apartheid context of Johannesburg depicted in District 9, especially for the figure of Wikus. As a white Afrikaner, he finds himself irrelevant and having to metamorphose into something he considers monstrous, within a setting that seems an uncanny parody of western urban planning. This brings to mind the anxiety that Trigg (2006: 130) discusses, relating to being displaced from rational modernist space, generally considered to be a “native form of dwelling” where humans “naturally” belong. In the context of urban ruination, this anxiety is related to the loss of the ostensibly utopian future of the city – a “retroactive causality” in which the now ruined city signifies a rupture in how the future would have been conceived within apartheid rhetoric (Hook 2014: 186–190, 2012: 232). From the perspective of apartheid’s white identity, the presence and activities of Black residents signify the loss of the “white vestiges” of the city (Mututa 2020: 216). The associated anxiety is also related to the threat of the abject and of subsumption into the undefined (Burgin 1991: 22); it is made more intense by the fear of the ‘other’, those on the margins of society (Arya 2014:7). The camp that houses the prawns in District 9 epitomises this allegorically, as an area where the other is quarantined, expelled from the city, unable to contaminate the humans, and where Wikus mutates into the abject as a result of such contamination.²¹ It is clear then that the sublime qualities of this ‘post-landscape’, which is post-apartheid, post-colonial, post-industrial, and perhaps post-sublime, is bound up with white anxiety, and has particular implications from this point of view.