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This paper thinks through Black South African urban masculinities as simultaneously created and located at the centres and margins of social and economic power. It grapples with the questions of self-writing, literary representations, and knowledge creation about citiness and identity creation in contemporary South Africa, Johannesburg. It seeks to interrogate and forge ‘newer’ strategies of narrating the gendered subject formation without essentialising the binaries of race, class, and sexuality while staging a difference that does not gloss over the various cultural seams that characterise the lived experiences of the Black South African youths living in Hillbrow and other peripheries of Johannesburg. This is achieved through a comparison and contrast of the apartheid fiction hustler and the contemporary hustler depicted in Kgebetli Moele’ Room 207 and Mhlongo’ Dog Eat Dog. I suggest that the novels proffer a nuanced depiction of gender and citiness that belies notions of Black youth’ freedoms, upward class mobility, and hospitality that are celebrated as markers of contemporary Johannesburg while celebrating brazen city vice as part of the new political and social order. The novel’s use of the street walker, realist modes of narration, wit, dry humour, and celebration of ‘sin’ and vice, grease, and grime of Hillbrow’s underworld contribute to a Black literary tradition that contests various forms of exclusion whose basis is contemporary apartheid. The novel’s contestation of the present through citiness and subjectivity creation is hinged on a backdrop of amnesia and suppressions of the past reinforced by rainbownism and the ideation of Mandela, which the Black youths have dislodged to mount a critique of the present through the #Fallist movements, whose precursors could be Moele and Mhlongo’s literary works as they broach the themes of alienation through social and financial academic exclusions at the University of Witwatersrand and the University of Cape Town.

In this paper, I investigate some of the reasons for the relative paucity of scholarly attention given to Niq Mhlongo’s debut novel, Dog Eat Dog. I argue that this text anticipates and articulates themes that are vital to contemporary South African culture generally, and to the academic space of the university specifically. For this reason, I contend that it is a work worthy of consideration, both because of its unusual form (it is a novel of ordeal rather than a Bildungsroman), and its prescient depiction of issues to do with institutional racism and academic exclusion – subjects which were central during the student-led protests on South African campuses in 2015 and 2016. A principal thesis of this article is that one of the reasons for literary study’s unwillingness to engage with the novel is the discipline’s predisposition to a hermeneutics of suspicion, a method of analysis that I show is unsuited to Mhlongo’s text. Instead, I argue for the use of surface reading as a valid and appropriate praxis given the form and the content of Dog Eat Dog.

In this paper, I investigate some of the reasons for the relative paucity of scholarly attention given to Niq Mhlongo's debut novel, Dog Eat Dog. I argue that this text anticipates and articulates themes that are vital to contemporary South African culture generally, and to the academic space of the university specifically. For this reason, I contend that it is a work worthy of consideration, both because of its unusual form (it is a novel of ordeal rather than a Bildungsroman), and its prescient depiction of issues to do with institutional racism and academic exclusion - subjects which were central during the student-led protests on South African campuses in 2015 and 2016. A principal thesis of this article is that one of the reasons for literary study's unwillingness to engage with the novel is the discipline's predisposition to a hermeneutics of suspicion, a method of analysis that I show is unsuited to Mhlongo's text. Instead, I argue for the use of surface reading as a valid and appropriate praxis given the form and the content of Dog Eat Dog.

The study of South African English literature written by black people in the post-apartheid period has focused, among others, on the so-called Hillbrow novels of Phaswane Mpe and Niq Mhlongo, and narratives such as Kgebetli Moele's Book of the Dead (2009) set in Pretoria. A number of studies show how the fiction of these writers handles black concerns that some critics believe to have replaced a thematic preoccupation with apartheid, as soon as political freedom was attained in 1994. However, adequate analyses are yet to be made of works produced by some of these black writers in their more rounded scrutiny of the first decade of democracy, apart from what one may describe as an indigenous/traditional weaning from preoccupation with the theme of apartheid. This study intends to fill this gap, as well as examine how such a richer social commentary is refracted in its imaginative critique of South African democratic life beyond its first decade of existence. I consider Mhlongo's novels Dog Eat Dog (2004) and After Tears (2007) together with Moele's narratives reflecting on the same epoch Room 207 (2006) and The Book of the Dead. For the portrayal of black lives after democracy, I unpack the discursive content of Mhlongo's narratives Affluenza (2016) and Way Back Home (2013), as well as Moele's Untitled (2013) respectively. I probe new ways in which these post-apartheid writers critique the new living conditions of blacks in their novelistic discourses. I argue that their evolving approaches interrogate literary imaginaries, presumed modernities and visions on socio-political freedom of a post-apartheid South Africa, in ways deserving critical attention. I demonstrate how Moele and Mhlongo in their novels progressively assert a self-determining indigeneity in a post-apartheid modernity unfolding in the context of some pertinent discursive views around ideas such as colour-blindness and transnationalism. I show how the discourses of the authors' novels enable a comparison of both their individual handling of the concepts of persisting institutional racism and the hegemonic silencing of white privilege; and distinguishable ways in which each of the two authors grapples with such issues in their fiction depicting black conditions in the first decade of South African democratic rule, differently from the way they do with portrayals of the socio-economic challenges faced by black people beyond the first ten years of South African democracy. Keywords: Black South African English literature, post-apartheid South Africa, transnational, institutional racism, colour-blindness, indigeneity, modernity.

According to Gqola (2009) this 'masculinist spectacle' is described as follows: 'By masculinist spectacle I refer to the hypervisible, and self-authorising performance of patriarchal masculinity in public spaces, where such performance hints at masculine violence or a contest between forms of manhood' (Gqola, 64). [...]the narrative paradigms and literary forms chosen and used in these narratives are linked and connected to the particular ideological conception of the world. [...]tragedy seeks to grasp the soul in its vision of the real beyond the surface issues of social status and practical utility. Mhlongo seems thus to be validating what Henri Bergson has said about the prerequisite of a comic effect: \"To produce the whole of its effect, then, the comic demands something like a momentary anesthesia of the heart\" (63-64). [...]for the comic effect to be functional, human affairs should be portrayed with unruffled indifference and minimal emotional involvement as Mhlongo is doing in this narrative.

Rachel Donadio discusses the struggles of post-apartheid writers in South Africa. Donadio briefly profiles Niq Mhlongo, one of a handful of post-aparthied black novelists who have achieved a certain level of prominence, and Zakes Mda, a South African writer now living in the US who is credited with helping to dismantle apartheid.