Abstract
In the last decade, there has been an emergence of cafés and growing appreciation for specialty coffee in Johannesburg. This thesis aims to interrogate coffee culture and café life in a transforming Johannesburg of post-apartheid South Africa. In this thesis, I argue that South Africa is in a state of liminality; a place between being and becoming post-apartheid, which I refer to as being in a state of transformation. To interrogate this, I zoomed in on Johannesburg and drew on Turner’s Social Drama framework to contextualise urban Johannesburg. Turner argued social drama as a process of breach, crisis, redress of action, and reintegration. Ultimately, reintegration is the state in which people negotiate identity and space. This thesis explored reintegration through coffee culture and café life in Maboneng Precinct, Johannesburg.
Corner Café, situated in Maboneng Precinct, served as the site to explore social life in the city. I employed embodied ethnography to immerse myself into the everyday life of the regulars, but also engaged with people who hang out outside the café on a daily basis. Regulars, café staff, a car guard, a beggar, and informal traders perform to negotiate, navigate, and strategise the larger social drama of Johannesburg through their daily participation in the microcosm of café life. I reveal how coffee consumption and café life are performed through social life both inside and outside the café as my participants psychically and unconsciously participate in reintegration of social life in Johannesburg.
My findings are explored in Chapters 7, 8, and 9 of this thesis and communicate how (i) coffee symbolically communicates exclusivity and is necessary for social bonding; (ii) a car guard, a beggar, and informal traders who exist on the outside of the café take advantage of café life in the hope of making some money or getting food, and (iii) Corner Café, through its regulars, reveals the powerful meaning of the café in providing a space to bond, perform, and negotiate the self. Each of the chapters draws on characteristics of performance theory (i.e., symbolism, ritualisation, spectacle, liminality, and liminoid) to unpack the meaning and relationship of coffee, the café, and people in the city. Ultimately, Corner Café is revealed as a liminoid space where individuals socially produce and construct urban life.
Keywords: Coffee, Café Life, Performance, Spectacle, Ritualisation, Liminality, Liminoid.