Half ’n Half

Mytho-Historical and Spatial Entanglements in Charlie Human’s Apocalypse Now Now and Kill Baxter

Bibliographic Data

ID20156613
AuthorsOlivier Moreillon (0000-0002-4437-2127, University of Basel), Alan Muller (0000-0002-2913-2109, University of KwaZulu-Natal, corresponding author)
Year2016
Volume32
Issue3
Pages77-97
Publication date2016-07-02
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Literary Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0256-4718 • E-ISSN: 1753-5387
PublisherUnisa Press (PUBLISHER • ZA)
DOI10.1080/02564718.2016.1235383
OpenAlexW2531662067
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited23

Since 2011, the genre of South African speculative fiction has seen a significant surfacing of new writers working within the genre. One of them is Charlie Human, the author of Apocalypse Now Now (2013) and Kill Baxter (2014). Our article analyses Human’s two novels in terms of overlapping mythological and historical lineages as well as spatial confluences and their influence on the conception and (re-)definition of South African whiteness. Using Sarah Nuttall’s concept of entanglement (a state of being intertwined or engaged with) in connection with Melissa Steyn’s observations of South African whiteness and its idiosyncratic position in relation to other postcolonial countries, we illustrate how Human’s novels (re-)negotiate South African whiteness by endowing it with a distinctly (Southern) African inflection. By way of conclusion, the paper proposes that speculative fiction gives an easier way to envisage possible solutions to the socio-political complexities at play in present South Africa, which are less difficult to swallow than what realist fiction might be (plausibly) able to offer

Art · Literature · Mythology · Negotiation · Political science · Politics · Social science · Sociology · Classics · Gothic Literature and Media Analysis · History · Law · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies · Utopian, Dystopian, and Speculative Fiction

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