Shining girls and forgotten men in Lauren Beukes’ urban “America”

Abstract

Following Achille Mbembe’s understanding of the “aesthetics of superfluity,” this article argues that in her novels set in the US, Broken Monsters and The Shining Girls, Lauren Beukes images the displacement and condensation of a rising global political unconscious. I argue that her novels underscore the violent drive of a white male imaginary that takes part in both US and South African infrastructural urban histories. Beukes dramatizes the eruptive racist and misogynistic violence that occurs when “the subject” of the former center is unable to construct a satisfying narrative of his objective circumstances, particularly when the nation, or more accurately global capitalism, has not made good on its promised narrative of “the good life.” The novels thus provide cautionary tales for the rise of white nationalism in the present while providing an ex-centric peoples’ history of American cities through the Afropolis.