Plural Ghetto. Phaswane Mpe’s "Welcome to Our Hillbrow" (2001), Neill Bloemkamp’s "District 9" (2009) and the crisis in the representation of spaces in post-apartheid South Africa

As Phaswane Mpe’s novel "Welcome to our Hillbrow" (2001) convincingly shows, the crisis suffered by post-apartheid ideological discourses is intimately related to a crisis in the representation of spaces. As a matter of fact, the demise of the apartheid regime of racial segregation has not led to a completely new spatial organization, producing, rather, a multiplicity of boundaries which range from the apartheid model of the township to newly constituted “migrant ghettos” such as Hillbrow, in the heart of Johannesburg. While South African spatiality is interrogated by Mpe’s novel though issues such as inter-African migration, AIDS and persisting forms of prejudice and racism, a comparison between Mpe’s novel and Neill Bloemkamp’s blockbuster movie "District 9" (2009) hints at the permanence of corporate violence as a major cause for this political and economic failure, by connecting it to a global scenario.