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"Taking its cue from Christopher Breu and Elizabeth A. Hatmaker’s rethinking of noir affect as a descriptor of detective fiction, this paper contributes to the discussion of South African writer Lauren Beukes’s Zoo City as a narrative that both harnesses and fluidifies the generic conventions of the crime thriller. Pondering Beukes’s claim that her story may become the site for the transmutation or transmission of ethically adjusted emotion, the paper resorts to Lauren Berlant’s thoughts on detective fiction as a genre condensing the “cruel optimism” of the ordinary, rather than the evental, present to explore the clues of affectional attunement in Lauren Beukes’s postapartheid novel."

Written six decades after the contentious, yet highly influential feminist saga The Country Girls and inspired by the traumatic abduction of several young Nigerian women by local terrorist factions in 2014, Edna O’Brien’s 2019 novel Girl echoes the author’s earlier concerns with Irish parochialism and patriarchalism. Maryam barely survives the ordeals of the terrorist camp. Moreover, her subsequent reinsertion in a society that completely effaces her illustrates the ever-shifting criteria that will determine if she is to be deemed fit for living or dying within globalized structures of governmentality. Focusing on Maryam’s flight from one carceral site to another, this paper inquires whether by building a sense of localized resistance that connects the female refugee to the endangered landscape, O’Brien’s narrative entertains a more widespread possibility for such transversal solidarity frames to counteract the “techno-thanatological” drive of power.

Guided by new materialist approaches to the memory of loss, this reading of Jackie Kay’s 1998 novel Trumpet surveys the affective permutations registered by different objects of remembrance in the Scottish-Nigerian writer’s fictional account of mourning. Exploring several material figurations of Black Scottishness in Kay’s writings, the essay derives its main theoretical framework from studies on blended subject-object ontologies, including Bill Brown’s critique of thingness, Maurizia Boscagli’s notion of the disruptive agency of stuff, and Mel Y Chen’s view of matter’s animacy, and discusses how the novel latches onto the role of things in anchoring memory and in helping humans work through bereavement.