Lauren Beukes's post-apartheid dystopia

InhabitingMoxyland

Datos Bibliográficos

ID2178774
AutoresLouise Bethlehem (0000-0003-2567-0134)
Año2014
Volumen50
Número5
Páginas522-534
Fecha de publicación2014-09-03
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaJournal of Postcolonial Writing (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 1744-9855 • E-ISSN: 1744-9863
EditorialInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/17449855.2013.813867
OpenAlexW2070290515
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas9
Referencias citadas18

This article reads South African science-fiction writer Lauren Beukes’s first novel, Moxyland (2008), set in a futuristic Cape Town, from the perspective of Lindsay Bremner’s notion of “citiness”, asking how cities produce the modernity of the subjects who inhabit them. The novel is remarkable for its dependence on the social geography of the South African city. The article charts Beukes’s resolutely mobile characters as they negotiate the spatial itineraries and technologies of governance in which they are embedded. It explores how Beukes’s futuristic urban setting fuses punitive forms of digital technology with the biopolitical regulation of social relations in an unsettling reprise of the apartheid groundplan. The analysis relates Moxyland to discussions of African city textualities – a critical rubric introduced by Ranka Primorac in this journal to signal the interplay of urban and textual networks in constituting the African city.Keywords: Lauren Beukespost-apartheid literaturebiopoliticsHIV/AIDSdystopian fictionscience fiction AcknowledgmentsThis paper was presented in a different form at the African Cities Conference, the African Centre for Cities, University of Cape Town, 7–9 September 2011, as well as at the Department of English, the University of Stellenbosch, 10 April 2013. My thanks go to Edgar Pieterse, Jennifer Robinson, Louise Green and Megan Jones for their generous responses in these various settings. I had the opportunity to present my work on Beukes as a visiting scholar at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research in April 2013. Thanks are due to Sarah Nuttall for this invitation and to all my interlocutors in the WISER colloquium for a riveting conversation. Brian McHale and the anonymous reviewers of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing made incisive contributions to this paper. I appreciate their suggestions. Lastly, I want to acknowledge the Harry S. Truman Institute for the Advancement of Peace at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem for supporting this research project

Art · Dystopia · Insider · Media studies · Modernity · Negotiation · Perspective (graphical · Political science · Social science · Sociology · Visual arts · Digital Games and Media · Spatial and Cultural Studies · Utopian, Dystopian, and Speculative Fiction · Gender Studies · Law