The excremental postapartheid imaginary: Niq Mhlongo’s Dog Eat Dog

Abstract

ABSTRACT Niq Mhlongo’s use of scatology in Dog Eat Dog foregrounds his exploration of the temporal affects of disillusionment and disappointment. Drawing together critical and theoretical writing on affect, scatology, the postcolony, and abjection, this article contends that corporeality is symbolically and politically significant in the postapartheid imaginary. This significance is evident throughout Dog Eat Dog, especially in two episodes set in university toilets, which explore through corporeal imagery the topics of racial abjection, vulnerability, and exclusion in postapartheid South Africa. The article draws attention to the affective and political aspects of Mhlongo’s excremental postapartheid vision, a feature of his (and others’) writing which should not be dismissed, for example, as extraneous or merely comic detail. Implicit in the argument is the call for nuanced readings in postapartheid literature of the body and its processes; these representations of corporeality often signal political inequality and exclusion within the social body itself.