Ways of Desiring: Postcolonial Affect in Zakes Mda’s The Whale Caller

Abstract

This essay offers a Deleuzean reading of desire in the relationship between the eponymous protagonist of Zakes Mda's The Whale Caller (2005) and a whale named Sharisha. In the setting of a highly stratified ecotourist village in South Africa where most characters relate to marine animals only through consumption and capitalization, the human-whale relationship between the protagonist and Sharisha offers a different mode of comportment. While some Animal Studies scholars read the novel as evidence of animal subjectivity and call for a recognition of animal rights in South African law, this essay contends that the novel's more significant contribution to ecocritical thought is its insistence on positing nonhuman desire as a mode of resistance to neocolonial capitalist violence. The essay also engages this discussion of nonhuman desire as resistance with postcolonial critiques of both resistance literature and posthuman accounts of subjectivity.

A Postcolonial Ecocritical Reading of Zakes Mda’s The Whale Caller and Helon Habila’s Oil on Water

“…Development, according to Huggan and Tiffin, is "part of arguments about the social as well as economic benefits of a world market system that is not necessarily antithetical to human equality or rides roughshod over local human and environmental interests in order to secure preferential conditions for international trade" (32). Both argue that modern development theories and practices are part of a well-intentioned effort to repair the damage done by colonialism by assisting in the creation of more beneficial economic and political conditions that might allow historically marginalized and/or exploited peoples to work toward building their own future while consolidating their own individual and collective human rights (32). On the other hand, Escobar asserts that there is a link between the end of colonialism in the Third World and the creation of the development discourse.…”

“…Both argue that the novel reveals this conflict between the two main protagonists, the Whale Caller as an environmentalist and Saluni as a social critic (15). Alongside, Jason Price (2017) argues that colonial tactics and intentions to protect humans and animals in Hermanus are due to being developed by characters like Saluni. As such, the tools of this novel are used to discuss human and non-human needs in order to resist neocolonial capitalist violence (58).…”