Dystopian Futures, Apartheid, and Postapartheid Allegories

Abstract

I would like to thank Andrew van der Vlies, John Bolin and the audiences at those events, as well as Aaron Bady, whose comments on an earlier draft were most helpful.

Hydrocolonial Johannesburg

“…Like Beukes' debut novel Moxyland (2008), the text welds speculative fiction to the topography of the South African city (Bethlehem 2014, 522). 2 Where Moxyland pivots on the relation between the urban infrastructure sustaining the information economy of a futuristic Cape Town and the necropolitical legacies of 1 The emphasis on planned violence distinguishes this approach from Nuttall's (2008) mapping of Johannesburg as a "literary city" with reference to the infrastructures of the (Bethlehem 2014;see Mbembe 2003), Zoo City makes salient the visible and invisible scaffolding of quotidian life in postapartheid Johannesburg (Bethlehem 2015, 13-14;Dickson 2014;Graham 2015, 71-75;Hoad 2016;Propst 2017;Sofianos 2013). If the novel approaches the status of "civic allegory" as Neville Hoad suggests (2016, 301), it is also shot through with references to local intertexts.…”