Zoo-keeping in Johannesburg: Man/Beast Contestations in Ivan Vladislavic's Portrait with Keys

This paper examines the status and confines of the Johannesburg zoo as portrayed in Ivan Vladislavic's Portrait with Keys. The relationship between the zoo and the city is satirically problematised in this text. Of central concern is the human-nature dichotomy and how Vladislavic deals with the complexity of these contrasting forces. By virtue of a playful challenge to anthropocentric claims to human superiority, Portrait with Keys blurs the neat (and perhaps illusory) taxonomisations set up to delineate man from beast. This is of ecological, social, and artistic significance in South Africa today.