Sanglap 3.2 (March 2017) City, Space and Literature 27 Writing Johannesburg into Being: Rituals of Mobility and the Uneven City in Mark Gevisser, Ivan Vladislavić and Lindsay Bremner’s Writing Rebekah Cumpsty The city of Johannesburg looms large in the South African cultural imaginary, particularly within literary fiction, and narratives that take the city as its setting are legion. 1 Contemporary fiction writers such as Phaswane Mpe, Lauren Beukes, Niq Mhlongo, Marlene van Niekerk and Eben Venter have used the city to conjure dystopian futures and to grapple with identity politics, xenophobia, HIV/AIDS as well as the place of literature in a changing and heterogeneous society. As Loren Kruger suggests, there “is no singular Johannesburg story”, nor is there a singular genre that encompasses the imaginative possibilities of writing this city into being (Kruger 78). However, the representation of urban mobility is a common theme across much of this literature, beginning with the “Jim comes to Joberg” trope, 2 and developing through more recent pedestrian narratives like Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow and Ivan Vladislavić’s The Restless Supermarket. This article explores the role of Johannesburg in the