Mutant City

As a city in which euphoric expectations for transition and liberation have stalled, Johannesburg has become a living laboratory of strange and unpredictable change. Mutant City explores the proliferation of Johannesburg in popular narrative forms. Speculative fiction like Lauren Beukes’ Zoo City, comics such as Loyiso Mkize’s Kwezi, graphic novels, sci-fi cinema, magical realism and daring hybrid works capture the city’s fractured rhythms, desires and anxieties. These narratives reject the neat binaries of progress versus ruin and reveal hauntings, contagions, drifts, apocalypse, entropy and inner battles. They feature characters whose shattered identities reveal a city that scrambles the old and the new, indigenous and global. Here, Afrofuturism jostles with the Gothic and ethnicity confronts late capitalism. Through the lens of mutancy – discontinuous, experimental transformations born from the city’s raw materiality – Timothy Wright uncovers the eerie beauty and sharp insights of these narratives and asks: as the story of redemptive emancipation fades, what futures does Johannesburg allow us to imagine – catastrophic or regenerative, mere survival or a radical becoming?