URBAN SPACES AS CARCERAL SITES: VOILENCE AND AGENCY IN SELLO DUICKER’S THIRTEEN CENTS

Abstract

This study examines the constitutive personality of urban spaces in Sello Duiker’s Thirteen Cents and discovers that urban centers/cities have become increasingly sites of physical and psychological incarceration from where the agencies of the dispossessed and marginalized are abrogated.  The protagonist and people like him in the novel are denied their essential humanity by their habitation of indeterminate and non-defensible social spaces and have their social contract with the social system redacted. They are exploited, imprisoned, raped, and traded as chattels.  This study uses urban theory, specifying the postulates of Max Weber, Le Corbusier (Charles-Edouard Jeanneret-Gris), David Harvey, Frederick Jameson, and Mike Davis to illustrate the tragic impulses that percolate around Azure’s search for a place of his own, which ultimately takes him to the mountain, the place of his apotheosis. In the mountain, a historicization of black troubles pin-points the origin of racial profiling and scapegoating, thus regaining his agency through his transmogrification as T-rex.  The capacity to wreak vengeance on those who had usurped his agency and traded on his weakness, homelessness, and innocence is born out of his divesting himself of the entire panoply of the historical baggage his society had heaped on him and taking on the will to change the confines by which he must live by dint of his potential and action