Ruinscapes and Temporalities in Lauren Beukes’s Zoo City

Abstract

ABSTRACT Zoo City is set in an alternative Johannesburg, in which animals and humans, and magic and science, co-operate and co-exist. In this alternate setting, people who commit murder are “animalled” with spirit animals that remain attached to their hosts for life. Despite its fantastical setting, Beukes’s novel challenges the hectic rhythm of Johannesburg by presenting the urban space as a temporal palimpsest, with each layer informing the city’s present. While evoking the detective mystery, the novel unfolds as a narrative of Zinzi’s political maturation. In this paper, I argue that Zoo City explores South Africa’s historical past through the novel’s fantastical ruinscape, which brings to the surface the colonial and apartheid national infrastructure of twenty-first-century Johannesburg. The palimpsestic textures within this ruinscape prompt a desire in characters to connect with the historical present against the amnesia-inducing time of hustle.