Lauren Beukes’s post-apartheid dystopia: inhabitingMoxyland

Abstract

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"-or 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. This article charts Beukes's resolutely mobile focalizers 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. My reading positions Moxyand in relation to discussions of African city textualities-a critical rubric introduced by Ranka Primorac in this journal-the better to explore how the novel makes history of dystopia.

Whose city? (De)colonising the bodies of speculative fiction in Lauren Beukes's Zoo City

“…The body is an important focus for this article because of the ways in which Beukes uses these bodily inscriptions to explore the breaking of boundaries which (de)colonise the body and body boundaries. Others, like Louise Bethlehem (2013) and Konstatin Sofianas (2013), draw attention to the novel's dystopian re-visioning of the postapartheid South African city, paying particular attention to the depiction of social divisions and fractures (now based on class rather than race), the social regulation of space and the repressive operations of technology in what emerges as a sophisticated new treatment of Foucauldian 'biopolitics '. For Sofianas (2013:115), much of the pleasure of Zoo City is located in the possibilities of 'spatial trespass' and the glamorous repackaging of the inner-city ghetto.…”

Pandemics, epidemics, viruses, plagues, and disease: Comparative frequency analysis of a cultural pathology reflected in science fiction magazines from 1926 to 2015

“…Science fiction is well known for significantly dystopian content, and the employment of dystopian scenarios across a wide range of cultural topics including gender, race, and health ( Barrish, 2016 ; Bethlehem, 2014 ; Dziubinskyj, 2007 ; Gilarek, 2012 ; McFadden, 2015 ; Milerius, 2011 ; Milner, 2009 ; Penteado, 2015 ; Raphals, 2013 ; Rhines, 2003 ). As a literature of thought experiments that investigate dystopian scenarios and the implications of human impacts on our world, and our technological interactions with it, it might be expected that science fiction would feature diseases, plagues, epidemics, and pandemics, and the viral vectors of these.…”

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.…”