The Pretorian Paradise Paradox: Waiting and Contemplating in the Middling City

Within the film and television industries of South Africa, Pretoria is perceived as a middling city that is seldom mentioned alongside the creative hubs of spectacular Cape Town and ambitious Johannesburg. Pretoria also carries the weight of having been seen as politically conservative and unimaginative in the past. This article suggests that in 1993 – a year before South Africa held its first democratic elections – the television series Tropical Heat (1991–1993), a co-production with Canada, amplified Pretoria’s status as a middling city by using it as a filming location for the fictional Florida seaside resort, Key Mariah. Yet it also imbued the city with political potential as a retrotopian space. This political potential is particularly resonant given the Pretoria-familiar viewer’s likely recognition of numerous locales in the series, as well as the viewer’s temporary suspension of this recognition to sustain the prime-time viewing image of a depoliticized tropical fantasy in the months preceding South Africa’s first democratic elections. At the same time, the artifice of this depoliticised narrative foregrounds actual political possibilities for a particular interpretive community of the series. The idea of such a community in itself is often accompanied by adjacent notions of nostalgia and authenticity, and emphasises belonging and identity.¹Anna C. Pertierra and Graeme Turner, Locating Television: Zones of Consumption (London: Routledge, 2013). Within this interpretive community is a hypothetical viewer who, along with other individuals, performs an interpretation of cultural outputs such as television series within a specific socioeconomic and political context. For the purposes of this article, the hypothetical viewer of Tropical Heat is imagined as a middle-class, white, likely Afrikaans-speaking individual and home owner or private home resident in Pretoria. This viewer would have had access to television and would likely have spent evenings in front of prime time television programming, which was scheduled either shortly after or just before the evening news bulletin.

Tropical Heat’s accidental Pretorian retrotopia

Borrowing sociologist Zygmunt Bauman’s work on retrotopias, this article contends that for the hypothetical Tropical Heat viewer imagined above, the future of soon-to-be-democratic South Africa was increasingly insecure and threatened whereas the past was a “safe and peaceful sanctuary.”²Dariusz Brzezinski, “From Revisionism to Retrotopia: Stability and Variability in Zygmunt Bauman’s Theory of Culture,” European Journal of Social Theory 23, no. 4 (2020): 459–476, https://doi.org/10.1177/1368431019860518. Here, the present becomes ever more entangled with the past.³Brzezinski, From Revisionism, 470. Bauman writes: “Most damagingly to our self-confidence … we are not the ones who control the present from which the future will germinate and sprout – and for that reason we have little, if any, hope of controlling that future.”⁴Zygmunt Bauman, Retrotopia (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017). One part of the retrotopian dynamic is a sense of social despair or malaise. I now cautiously suggest that the dissonant paralysis elicited by Tropical Heat’s layering of trashy American entertainment over a recognisable Pretoria surprisingly imbues the city with retrotopian potential. On the one hand, even when viewed in the present of 1993, Tropical Heat endows Pretoria-as-Key-Mariah with a quality of pastness, indeed “a past of popular television series rather than history books.”⁵Jerzy Kociatkiewicz and Monika Kostera, “After Retrotopia? The Future of Organizing and the Thought of Zygmunt Bauman,” Scandinavian Journal of Management 34 (2018): 335–342, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scaman.2018.05.003. Bauman uses retrotopia as “a negation of the idea that ultimate perfection can be achieved and its replacement with a desire to have no social change”; that is, a lack of political commitment articulated as paralysis.⁶Shaun Best, The Emerald Guide to Zygmunt Bauman (Bingley: Emerald Publishing Limited, 2020).

However, this retrotopia is also a call to action, a reconfiguration of waiting as active contemplation: Pretoria-as-Key-Mariah unintentionally (hence, accidentally) appeals to the attentive interpretive community to reconsider the city – its sites, symbols and values – as a future potential, a promise of what life can appear to be in a democratic country (notwithstanding the beaches). The middling city can be rehabilitated from city-as-setting to considerations of the city as present-set and future-oriented. The image of Pretoria in Tropical Heat had and has the potential to undo political conservatism and paralysis, should the hypothesized viewer choose to activate and pursue that potential.

Tropical Heat (also known as Sweating Bullets) was an episodic sunshine noir series that ran for three seasons of more than thirty episodes each from 1991 to 1993. Featuring Rob Stewart as pony-tailed detective Nick Slaughter and Carolyn Dunn as his eventual sidekick-cum partner Sylvie Gerard, the series was a popular Friday night prime-time television staple in South Africa. The crime-solving drama was set in the fictional resort town of Key Mariah in the American state of Florida. While the first two seasons and part of the third season of Tropical Heat were filmed in Mexico and Israel respectively, more than half the third season was filmed in South Africa, specifically in the country’s administrative capital Pretoria (with beach scenes filmed in Mauritius). In the Referendum of 1992, South African voters were asked to vote “Yes” for “the end of isolation, sanctions and boycotts” and for “foreign investments, loans and capital.”⁷Annette Strauss, “The 1992 Referendum in South Africa,” The Journal of Modern African Studies 31, no. 2 (1993): 339–360, https://www.jstor.org/stable/161008. Having established stronger ties with foreign partners before the Referendum, a “Yes” vote would specifically also benefit ties between South Africa and Israel in the areas of culture, trade, and tourism.⁸Strauss, The 1992 Referendum, 350. On screen, Pretoria has starred as itself (i.e., the setting of Pretoria represents the actual city of Pretoria) on a few occasions, such as Franz Marx’s feature film Die Prins van Pretoria (The Prince of Pretoria, 1993), which deploys the city with a high level of verisimilitude. The viewer understands that the film is set in Pretoria because the narrative informs them as such, and also because they recognise Pretorian sites in the film as Pretorian. Much later, Francis Annan’s Escape from Pretoria (2020), with its narrative set in 1979, would spend considerable resources to recreate and recapture the Pretoria of the past within its escape thriller genre parameters, while the 1980s-set Silverton Siege (2022) used existing city architecture and infrastructure to ensure its period veracity.

Pretoria as middling city

To situate the series politically within its moment of production and exhibition, Tropical Heat was broadcast on South African television for an audience that at once understood the narrative procedures of coding Pretoria as the fictional Key Mariah, yet at the same time watched the series against the backdrop of a politically volatile country on the eve of its first democratic elections (in which Pretoria, with its Union Buildings and official presidential residence, was a key site). Key Mariah is presented throughout the third season as a space of multicultural diversity where individuals of numerous races and ethnicities interact and perform labour. This diversity is presented as commonplace (and safe, unthreatening – middling, even) and could provoke viewers to contemplate the contradiction between the lived-in space of Pretoria and the imagined geography of Pretoria-as-Key-Mariah in Tropical Heat.

During times of political tumult, white voters traditionally veered between liberalism, conservatism and separatism.⁹Morris Szeftel, “’Negotiated Elections’ in South Africa, 1994,” Review of African Political Economy 21, no. 61 (1994): 457–470, https://www.jstor.org/stable/4006156. In the early 1990s, Hermann Giliomee described perceptions of South Africa as one of the countries “where a transition to democracy is least likely”,¹⁰Hermann Giliomee, “Democratization in South Africa,” Political Science Quarterly 110, no. 1 (1995): 83–104, https://www.jstor.org/stable/2152052. while Abdul Minty confirmed South Africa’s political and financial isolation at the time.¹¹Abdul S. Minty, “South Africa: From Apartheid to Democracy,” Security Dialogue 24, no. 1 (1993): 69–84, https://www.jstor.org/stable/44471436. It is this productive tension between the series’ fictional Key Mariah and the historical material conditions of 1993 South Africa that plays out across the city of Pretoria, and ascribes to this former conservative, “confusing” Afrikaner political stronghold the status of “middling city”.

“Middling” here describes the occurrence of Pretoria-as-Key-Mariah as a politically evasive iteration of the city, a televised liminality characterized by contradictory processes of recognition and omission in the present act of viewing, as opposed to remembering and forgetting in looking back from the present to the past.¹²Stefan L. Brandt, “The City as Liminal Space: Urban Visuality and Aesthetic Experience in Postmodern U.S. Literature and Cinema,” Amerikastudien/American Studies 54, no. 4 (2009): 553–581, https://www.jstor.org/stable/41158465 When watching a television show, viewers are influenced by a layered collection of contexts (political, social, personal) that inform how groups of individuals as interpretive communities understand media outputs such as television series.¹³Melissa A. Click, H. Wilson Holladay, and Amanda Nell Egar, “NFL Broadcasts. Interpretive Communities,” in How to Watch Television, 2nd ed., ed. Ethan Thompson and Jason Mittell (New York: New York University Press, 2020), 363–371. The political context invariably overlaps with the economic context. By the late 1980s, the South African economy was already stagnating under sanctions while, as Giliomee points out, “it was generally believed [by the ruling National Party] that white supremacy was under no immediate threat”¹⁴Giliomee, Democratization, 85. while the economy continued to deteriorate into 1992.¹⁵Giliomee, Democratization, 96. Jonathan Hyslop recalls a state of “political, moral and emotional paralysis” that characterized white South Africans in the 1980s.¹⁶ Jonathan Hyslop, “Why Did Apartheid’s Supporters Capitulate? ‘Whiteness’, Class and Consumption in Urban South Africa, 1985–1995,” Society in Transition 31, no. 1 (2000): 36–44, https://doi.org/10.1080/21528586.2000.10419009. This dual sense of political stagnation and paralysis ties into those qualities that characterize Pretoria as middling: conservatism and confusion.

For the hypothetical viewer of Tropical Heat, Pretoria-as-Key-Mariah offers a televisual encounter that nostalgically positions Pretoria as “the product of a shared historical consciousness of general displacement that is able to make parochial misfortunes and individual losses socially meaningful”.¹⁷Marie-Cécile Cervellon and Stephen Brown, Revolutionary Nostalgia: Retromanie, Neo-Burlesque, and Consumer Culture (Bingley: Emerald Publishing Limited, 2018). This viewer was likely to be white: by 1994, as much as 94.7 percent of white homes had television access, and the category “overseas drama” enjoyed great appeal for those households.¹⁸Daan Van Vuuren, “Radio and Television Audiences in South Africa: 1994–2002,” Communicatio 30, no. 2 (2004): 1–23, https://doi.org/10.1080/02500160408537993. The history of television in South Africa is deeply political. Within the national context of white cultural protectionism, Rob Nixon suggests, “South Africa became television’s final frontier in the industrialised world”.¹⁹Rob Nixon, “The Devil in the Black Box: Ethnic Nationalism, Cultural Imperialism, and the Outlawing of TV under Apartheid,” Collected Seminar Papers. Institute of Commonwealth Studies 45 (1993): 120–137. Television was seen by its proponents as a positive force for change, while its detractors labelled the medium and technology a “catalyst for degeneration”.²⁰Nixon, The Devil, 121. Television finally entered the South African market in 1976, and Hyslop reports that “television programmes reflecting the relatively liberal ethos of the 1970s in America were dramatically out of kilter with prevailing white South African representations of race, gender and sexuality”²¹Jonathan Hyslop, “Why Did Apartheid’s Supporters Capitulate? ‘Whiteness’, Class and Consumption in Urban South Africa, 1985-1995,” Society in Transition 31, no. 1 (2000): 36–44, https://doi.org/10.1080/21528586.2000.10419009.; this disconnectedness likely remained into the 1990s when Tropical Heat showcased its commonplace multicultural diversity. As Gavin Schaffer explains, by the late 1980s, the South African government was effectively “undermining news broadcasts and preventing international media from making current affairs programmes about apartheid”.²²Gavin Schaffer, “The Limits of the ‘Liberal Imagination’,” Past & Present, no. 240 (2018): 233-266, https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/26802000. Instead of making politically progressive programmes, the official state broadcaster, the South African Broadcast Corporation (SABC), would offer viewers escapist fictions in mainstream entertainment such as Tropical Heat.

Such was the series’ appeal – and so limited was the broadcaster’s budget – that Tropical Heat was rebroadcast repeatedly by the SABC as recently as 2016. It is worth noting that the SABC of the early 1990s was, per Minty’s description, run by a sixty-four-person board of which sixty-one members were white men; this Board’s tenure would come to an end in March 1993.²³Minty, South Africa, 79. Tropical Heat’s original run on South African television ended two years before the country hosted the Rugby World Cup in 1995, an event that signaled South Africa’s complete return to major international sports events.²⁴Annette Strauss, “The 1992 Referendum in South Africa,” The Journal of Modern African Studies 31, no. 2 (1993): 339–360, https://www.jstor.org/stable/161008.

Diegetically, Tropical Heat’s Key Mariah repurposes Pretoria to depict the very ideal of an American tourist paradise: palm trees, bikinis, beaches, and sundowners in an ostensibly multicultural faux-Caribbean seaside outpost free from class tensions and other intersectional concerns. Tropical Heat’s use of Pretoria to visualise the series’ exotic setting generates a dissonant fiction around the televisual fantasy of Pretoria-as-Key-Mariah and the political importance of this politically middling city. These tensions partly relate to the Pretoria-familiar viewer’s likely recognition of numerous Pretorian locales in the series – including but not limited to the suburbs of Hatfield and Hillcrest, and the Pretoria Country Club – as well as the viewer’s temporary suspension of this recognition to sustain the prime-time image of a depoliticized tropical fantasy in the months preceding South Africa’s first democratic elections. These Tropical Heat viewers, especially if they lived in Pretoria, would recognize Pretoria and its many connotations in the series and then omit this city and its meanings in favour of Key Mariah. This viewing procedure of recognition and omission sustained the ambivalence of Pretoria as conservative city and as a site of contesting ideologies during the politically vital period of 1993 in particular, which sets it apart from the suspension of disbelief that generally characterizes watching television.

Within the context of pop-cultural televisual imaginaries, Saunders describes the television series The Bridge as a world-building scheme that, in its focus on shared borders between two Nordic cities in different countries (Sweden, Denmark), both reinforces and transcends the national identities of these countries as configured in its sociocultural geographies.²⁵Robert A. Saunders, “Geopolitical Television at the (B)order: Liminality, Global Politics, and World-Building in ‘The Bridge’,” Social & Cultural Geography 20, no. 7 (2019): 981–1003, https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2017.1404122. In contrast, and as also signaled by notions of “confusion”, conservatism and political paralysis, the early 1990s Pretoria of Tropical Heat – that is, Pretoria-as-Key-Mariah – serves to emplace its viewer through a retrotopian encounter. This televised escapist fiction that captures and reframes a middling city fixes its viewer in place, and does not narratively and diegetically invite the viewer to critically reflect on what “South Africa” means, and what “Pretoria” is on screen and in reality. If The Bridge’s call to reflection is deliberate (by the very nature of its overt politics), Tropical Heat’s appeal to Pretoria-familiar viewers is accidental, a call to reflection potentially cued by the absence of Pretoria as an actual political site. As indicated earlier, this retrotopian encounter does, however, have political potential. Much of this potential is located in the act and experience of waiting, and also in understanding the political significance of filming Tropical Heat in Pretoria and not a coastal city.

The next section provides an overview of Pretoria as a historical and political space, and aims to contextualise a hypothetical interpretive community who resided in Pretoria and then recognised Pretoria-as-Key-Mariah as Pretoria.

Pretoria and its viewers

The city of Pretoria is a metropolitan area and is a core city of the megalopolis Gauteng.²⁶Herman Geyer, Philip Geyer, and Manie Geyer, “The South Africa Functional Metropolis – A Synthesis,” Town & Regional Planning 67 (2015): 13–26, https://journals.ufs.ac.za/index.php/trp/article/view/578. The discovery of gold in the former Transvaal province of South Africa meant that Johannesburg and the national capital Pretoria “emerged as the economic and political heart of the nation”.²⁷Mario Polèse, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Cities Matter (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). As Mario Polèse recounts, the apartheid government developed influx controls to reify the borders between “us” (white) and “them” (black) with the aim of keeping black South Africans out of cities.²⁸Polèse, Wealth and Poverty, 140. Pretoria is therefore often perceived as middling on the basis of its apartheid design and infrastructure, its historical political conservatism, and its practices of exclusion, which it indeed represented in the early 1990s. As a landlocked city with clearly segregated urban spatial design – a central business district; a number of historically white, Afrikaans suburbs; and numerous black townships such as the sprawling Mamelodi – Pretoria is often derided as an enduringly conservative space compared to the more richly diverse Johannesburg and the culturally dynamic, wealthy port city Cape Town. In addition, Pretoria was named after the Afrikaner Andries Pretorius, who played a pivotal role in the northern migration of those Afrikaners who participated in the Great Trek (estimated 1835–1845). Of course, the perceptions of these cities are more allegation than fact, yet it falls outside of the scope of the currently article to describe the historical and residual apartheid logics of Johannesburg and Cape Town.

Paul Maylam outlines three primary pillars of urban apartheid: the control of black South Africans entering urban areas; additional social control through dehumanising policies such as segregation; and a “thin veneer of participation and democracy” though urban black South African involvement in institutions such as advisory boards.²⁹Paul Maylam, “The Rise and Decline of Urban Apartheid in South Africa,” African Affairs 89, no. 354 (1990): 57–84, https://www.jstor.org/stable/722496. Evidently, much black participation in white-designated political affairs was tokenistic and impermanent. Apparently, Pretoria’s white Afrikaans inhabitants clung to a politically conservative view of a city that Damon Galgut’s Booker Prize-winning novel The Promise (2021) identifies as a space of white (Afrikaner) cultural and political stagnation. In Galgut’s book, its residents are unexpectedly dangerous at times; one description of Pretoria’s historically white and Afrikaans Moot area warns visitors to “be careful of the Moot because there the children bite the dogs”. In this version of the city and her people, which the author of this article has encountered a number of times at social events, Pretorians cannot help but be uneducated, unsophisticated and uncouth. This perception is often couched in a class-based discourse that distinguishes between the more affluent eastern parts of the city (Pretoria East), with its signifiers of new money and upward social mobility, and the lower-to-middle income suburbs of Pretoria North and Pretoria West.

The author of this article lives in central-northern Pretoria and finds many of the negative perceptions of the city outdated and uninformed, especially the person-based stereotypes. However, these perceptions and stereotypes have a history, and ought to be taken seriously. Rita Barnard recalls the historical status of Pretoria as “apartheid’s capital”, a microcosm for “state-ordained racism”.³⁰Rita Barnard, “’See Pretoria Through New Eyes’: Modernism, Memory and the Apartheid City,” Image & Text 25, no. 1 (2015): 161–174, https://hdl.handle.net/10520/EJC176320. Apartheid’s ideological extremism was, as Gavin Schaffer describes it, “fundamentally irrational”.³¹Schaffer, The Limits, 265. Barnard powerfully evokes Pretoria as a city of binaries, of “suburban ordinariness in extraordinarily good weather” that has seen its share of “rebellions, protests, historic trials and funerals, massacres, bombings and inaugurations”.³²Barnard, See Pretoria, 164. The contrasting images of social smoothness and disruptions in Barnard’s account portray a city whose real estate value is undercut by the potential of violence.

Barnard continues: “Everyday life in Pretoria under apartheid…was deeply confusing in both its intellectual and psychological aspects”.³³Barnard, See Pretoria, 166. This Pretoria was a paradox, a space of contestation between anchored conservatism and possible progressivism: Pretoria is a city in which nothing happens, while everything happens. In addition to its legacy of political conservatism, Pretoria is then also a middling city on the basis of its liminality. It is a city that, on the cusp of South Africa’s first democratic elections in 1994, was seen to not – or too slowly – commit to a more politically inclusive and humane future. Such a lack of commitment can be construed as an act of waiting. Waiting is a particular experience of time and space. As Rebecca Sutton, Darshan Vigneswaran and Harry Wels explain, to wait is to have both despair and hope in a state of transition.³⁴Rebecca Sutton, Darshan Vigneswaran, and Harry Wels, “Waiting in Liminal Space: Migrants’ Queuing for Home Affairs in South Africa,” Anthropology Southern Africa 34, no. 1–2 (2011): 30–37, https://doi.org/10.1080/23323256.2011.11500006. Waiting is always preceded and followed by something else and as such it is precarious.³⁵Sutton, Vigneswaran and Wels, Waiting, 32–33. Waiting, then, can be a vulnerable individual and collective state of transition. In the case of Tropical Heat and its viewers, this transition is overtly – if accidentally – political. Waiting often activates “a fixation on a place and subjection to the passage of time”, which in the case of Tropical Heat suggests an appeal to the viewer to engage with Pretoria (a lived-in space) recoded as the faux-exotic Key Mariah.³⁶Henk Van Houtum and Stephen F. Wolfe, “Waiting,” in Border Aesthetics: Concepts and Intersections, ed. Johan Schimanski and Stephen F. Wolfe (New York: Berghahn Books, 2017), 129–146.

Waiting in Pretoria

Pretoria of the early 1990s was a space of waiting with an undercurrent of potential action. This act of waiting formed part of the social fabric of the hypothetical Tropical Heat viewer discussed earlier. As Johan Schimanski and Stephen Wolfe remind us, waiting is “an activity which often takes place at borders… Indeed, the border can be defined as an act of waiting”.³⁷Johan Schimanski and Stephen F. Wolfe, “Intersections: A Conclusion in the Form of a Glossary,” in Border Aesthetics: Concepts and Intersections, ed. Johan Schimanski and Stephen F. Wolfe (New York: Berghahn Books, 2017), 147–169. Here, [where?] “acts of waiting also characterize our experiences with artistic forms: waiting for stories to begin or end, waiting for meaning, etc”. Tropical Heat begins and ends; each episode is neatly wrapped up at the end to confirm the re-establishment of equilibrium. The borders between fact (Pretoria) and fiction (Key Mariah) ostensibly remain in place throughout.

For the hypothetical viewer, there are multiple borders at play in this viewing experience which doubles as an act of waiting, predominantly the borders between home (the 1990s living room with the tube television set as its centerpiece), and the realities of the outside world. While Tropical Heat’s narrative simplicity seems placating and safe, the viewer waiting for meaning could recognise the series itself as redrawing the borders of the very city they inhabit, and then renaming that city. It is here in this recognition of the deliberate activities of redrawing and renaming that Tropical Heat makes possible a positive retrotopian dynamic. In this scenario, the Pretorian living room becomes a space of waiting that pulls the viewer towards the political fiction playing out on their television. “Spaces of waiting”, write Christoph Singer, Robert Wirth and Olaf Berwald, “serve to expose the ideological intentions that lie behind these regulations [of public spaces]”.³⁸Christoph Singer, Robert Wirth, and Olaf Berwald, “Introduction,” in Timescapes of Waiting: Spaces of Stasis, Delay and Deferral, ed. Christoph Singer, Robert Wirth, and Olaf Berwald (Boston: Brill, 2019), 1-16. While the living room is admittedly far removed from other spaces of waiting such as hotel lobbies, vehicle license renewal centers, and the standing queues of the Department of Home Affairs, it remains a space of waiting in which “the volatile nature of linear, teleological time” is foregrounded and where – unlike in the bedroom or kitchen – a retrotopian dynamic may be activated.³⁹Singer, Wirth and Berwald, Timescapes, 6. Singer et al. observe that modern technologies such as the mobile phone have “changed the very nature of waiting…along with the spaces in which it has been traditionally performed”.⁴⁰Singer, Wirth and Berwald, Timescapes, 4 The Pretorian living room is itself transformed as the primary domestic site in which American fictions may inadvertently call the hypothetical viewer to reflect on the contradictions between the facts and fictions of Pretoria-as-Key-Mariah. The living room is itself a class-signaling room that implies an abundance of premium space and overall domestic size that many black South Africans did not have access to in informal settlements. This acknowledgement of the living room as signifying a white middle-class space is a stark reminder that the act of waiting is not devoid of power relations; as Singer et al. put it, “privileged or wealthy people, who in theory have enough time, money and leisure to wait, are however often the ones who need not necessarily wait… The powerless seem to wait more and longer than the powerful”.⁴¹Singer, Wirth and Berwald, Timescapes, 5 The retrotopian potential of Tropical Heat was available only to a minority of viewers, which underlines how often productive waiting (i.e. waiting as active contemplation) was (and likely remains) a luxury affordance. Indeed, spaces of waiting remain tense, insofar as these spaces can offer opportunities of reflection and active contemplation, or be demoralizing. As Singer et al. explain, spaces of waiting “may alienate or connect people”, and while such spaces “may be able to provide a sense of community, more often than not they leave the waiting subject alone, disoriented and dependent”.⁴²Singer, Wirth and Berwald, Timescapes, 8.

Tropical Heat’s retrotopian and discordant fiction may have been disorienting and even demoralizing, considering the Pretorian and South African political landscape of the time. On the other hand, it may have provided – albeit with limited social and tangible impact – opportunities for certain viewers to make sense of their waiting (in a political sense, where profound transition was taking place) and, in their waiting, to actively contemplate and make sense of the gaps and fissures between lived-in and imagined cities as part of an individual and possibly collective commitment to a new political dispensation. This notion of waiting, and the productive potential of the contemplation it may inspire, underscores Tropical Heat’s retrotopian dynamic.

Chris Broodryk

Chris Broodryk (PhD, University of Cape Town) is Associate Professor in the School of the Arts, Faculty of Humanities, University of Pretoria. His trans-disciplinary research focuses on identity dynamics and cultural expression, which ranges across film studies, television studies, social media studies, and climate action. He has published academic articles, book reviews, film reviews, and play reviews in peer-reviewed journals such as Journal of African Cinemas and Critical Arts. He is the editor of Public Intellectuals in South Africa: Critical Voices from the Past (Wits University Press, 2021).