At home in Johannesburg? Rethinking cosmopolitanism through TJ/Double Negative, the joint project between David Goldblatt and Ivan Vladislavić

This article examines the cosmopolitan character of TJ/ Double Negative (2010) and argues that the prize-winning pho- tography book, co-produced by the South African photographer David Goldblatt and writer and editor Ivan Vladislavić, is both a symptomatic expression of uneven development and a self- conscious interrogation of that unevenness. e book comprises two parts: Goldblatt’s iconic photographic series, TJ: Johannesburg Photographs 1948–2010, and Vladislavić’s novel Double Negative, a meta ction that refracts the story of modern Johannesburg along with Goldblatt’s career and the concomitant genre evolu- tion of South African photojournalism from local “documentary” to world-renowned “art,” as TJ reconstructs it. is experiment in interdiscursivity is signi cant not simply for being the rst of its kind—“a unique event in publishing” (“TJ & Double Negative”), as the publisher, Contrasto, declares in its marketing blurb—but also because through this collaborative yet multi-modal venture a new mode of critical cosmopolitanism in world-literature might emerge.

Volume 47, Numbers 1-2, January-April 2016