Zoo City Research Articles

Literary reading as a web of relationships: Implications for pedagogy at a South African university

We teach English literature in South Africa, to third- or fourth-language English speakers. Increasingly dissatisfied with the effectiveness of our pedagogy under conditions of massification, we seek to agitate propositions about our students’ reading and what these propositions means for our pedagogy. Drawing on narrative theory we analyse our students’ written responses to a portfolio assessment designed to scaffold their reading of a setwork novel, Lauren Beukes’ Zoo City. Six patterns emerge, around paraphrase, compensation strategies that replace literary reading, repertoires of knowledge and how these relate to access, personal salience and dissonance, reader discomfort, and decolonial opportunities. Understanding the students’ reading for our course as a complex web of material, social and affective relations opens avenues for pedagogy and assessment design that frames literary reading as communal encounter.

South African Literature and the “Strange Seductiveness” of the Fantastic

In postcolonial literature, magic realism and science fiction are two subgenres that have worked diligently to contest realism as a Western novelistic tradition. In the South African context, the fantastic initiates a process of psychic liberation from old (white) world-narrative domination and its cognitive codes. It recapitulates problems of historical consciousness in (post)apartheid cultures and interrogates inherited notions of imperial history. This article reads two “fantastic” texts that belong to a similar postcolonial culture―South Africa―and strives to explain the ways in which these texts recapitulate, in both their narrative discourse and their thematic content, the “real” social and historical context in which (post)apartheid South African culture exists and thrives. Zakes Mda’s Ways of Dying and Lauren Beukes’s Zoo City use magic realism and science fiction respectively to re-view and debunk inherited literary modes of colonial discourse and to work towards more authentic yet challenging codes of recognition. By so doing, they offer positive and liberating responses to emerging cultural forms.

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

This article explores the (de)colonisation of the body and body boundaries in contemporary South African speculative fiction, paying particular attention to award-wining author, Lauren Beukes's, second novel, Zoo City (2010). I will apply Lara Cox's (2018:317) argument that 'Haraway's cyborg resembles the liminal view of identity presented by queer theory, which seeks to blur strict divisions between sexual and gender categories, dissolving binary oppositions such as woman/man and heterosexual/homosexual', to my reading of Zoo City. By centring the novel around Zinzi December, a resident of 'Zoo City' (the marginalised underbelly of Johannesburg), and situating the novel in the cradle of humankind, Beukes reacts against South Africa's colonial history and its colonisation of the body by blurring the animal-human boundary and challenging the colonial construct of body binaries. The novel can be read as a decolonial feminist text as it re-writes South Africa's apartheid history and critiques its division, separation and bodily segregation. Furthermore, I explore how fictional bodies are imagined and constructed in the text; I ask what kinds of boundary-breaking bodies predominate; and consider their thematic, narrative, and political significance in the postapartheid imaginary in relation to speculative fiction. I examine how new boundaries (particularly between 'normative' society and 'Zoo City') are formulated. Zoo City pulls into focus Kristeva's (1982) notion of the abject body as a central to its concerns, while also bringing attention to Foucault's (1992) notion of the 'disciplined' body. It foregrounds questions about the formulation and destabilisation of identity, with a particular focus on the construction of female identity. This article builds on the critical literature on the dystopian post-apartheid state by examining Zoo City's depictions of marginalised people and its construction of the body and body boundaries, as well as by extending the examination of representations of the body in speculative fiction.

South African Literature and the “Strange Seductiveness” of the Fantastic

Abstract In Postcolonial literature, magic realism and science fiction are two sub-genres that have worked diligently to contest realism as a western novelistic tradition. In the South African context, the fantastic initiates a process of psychic liberation from old (White) world narrative domination and its cognitive codes. It recapitulates problems of historical consciousness in (post)apartheid cultures and interrogates inherited notions of imperial history. This paper reads two “fantastic” texts that belong to a similar post-colonial culture—South Africa—and strives to explain the ways in which these texts recapitulate, in both their narrative discourse and their thematic content, the “real” social and historical context in which (post)apartheid South African culture existed and thrived. Zakes Mda’s Ways of Dying and Lauren Beukes’ Zoo City use magic realism and science fiction respectively to re-view and debunk inherited literary modes of colonial discourse and to work towards more authentic yet challenging “codes of recognition”. By so doing, they offer positive and liberating responses to new emerging cultural forms.

Ruinscapes and Temporalities in Lauren Beukes’s Zoo City

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.

Noir Affect in Lauren Beukes’s Zoo City

"Taking its cue from Christopher Breu and Elizabeth A. Hatmaker’s rethinking of noir affect as a descriptor of detective fiction, this paper contributes to the discussion of South African writer Lauren Beukes’s Zoo City as a narrative that both harnesses and fluidifies the generic conventions of the crime thriller. Pondering Beukes’s claim that her story may become the site for the transmutation or transmission of ethically adjusted emotion, the paper resorts to Lauren Berlant’s thoughts on detective fiction as a genre condensing the “cruel optimism” of the ordinary, rather than the evental, present to explore the clues of affectional attunement in Lauren Beukes’s postapartheid novel."

Hydrocolonial Johannesburg

Johannesburg is a landlocked city, famously the largest human concentration in the southern hemisphere not located on a river. What opportunities does it afford for hydrocolonial analysis, given Isabel Hofmeyr's anchoring of that term in oceanic studies? How might a hydrocolonial orientation defamiliarize the relations between surface and depths that have shaped influential recent accounts of the city? This article outlines the contours of a “hydrocolonial Johannesburg” though combining Isabel Hofmeyr, Charne Lavery and Sarah Nuttall's invitation to “read for water” with existing methodologies that read for infrastructure. It sets these strategies to work in the context of Lauren Beukes' second work of speculative fiction, Zoo City (Beukes, Lauren. 2010. Zoo City. Johannesburg: Jacana Media). The novel propels its readers into a noiresque fantasy world whose spatial coordinates closely reflect the extra-textual city of Johannesburg. Taking my cue from Beukes' infrastructural allusions, I mobilize her text to provide the struts for my own as I explore the intertextuality of Zoo City with works by William Kentridge and Sarah Gertrude Millin. Alternately foregrounded or barely perceptible until deliberately sought out, water helps to distinguish the various locales of the novel from one another. My essay turns to Zoo City to offer three vignettes that trace the flows of water and the contiguous presence of infrastructures in Johannesburg, pursuing their intersection beyond the boundaries of the novel into a larger expressive cultural archive to reflect on the relations between privilege and forms of anthropogenic degradation in the life of the city.

Queering the Lost Child and the Politics of Failure in Lauren Beukes’s Zoo City

Lauren Beukes’s Zoo City (Johannesburg: Jacana Media, 2010) is a central edifice in the ever-growing genre of South African crime fiction. A decidedly post-apartheid literary trend (though not exclusive to it), crime fiction contributes to commentary on South African futurity, which is often portrayed as violent and almost always disappointing. Understanding the ways in which South African literature has been beleaguered with anxieties about the future, this article employs the figure of the queer child as an analytic to explore the generative politics of failure. Taking up queer theory’s anti-social thesis, recently considered in Andrew van der Vlies’s Present Imperfect: Contemporary South African Writing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), and the concept of the queer child, put forward in Kathryn Bond Stockton’s The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), I argue that while the queer child may disrupt a narrative of reproductive futurism, it offers an alternative to both a failed future and a rainbow one. I consider the role of two types of queer children in the novel: the child queered by innocence and the child queered by degeneracy. By examining the exchange of and relationships between these children, I argue that the child queered by degeneracy hitches South African futurity to a queer celebration of state failure.

Science Fiction and the Imagined South African and Other Worlds in Lauren Beukes’s Novels

This article examines the cityscapes, residents’ experiences and different temporalities depicted in Lauren Beukes’s Moxyland, Zoo City and The Shining Girls. The analysis considers the cityscapes and everyday life experiences in the depicted cyber and futurist Cape Town, futurist fantasy Johannesburg and a cyclically time-travelled and crime-ridden Chicago. It also evaluates the role of the science fiction genre in presenting the sense of space in the different cities and in the process establishes possible comparable visions of urban experiences. Hence, the article argues that the link between space and time and genre assists in mapping the city’s and other worlds’ landscapes and the residents’ experiences vividly, and in that way enables the reader to imaginatively establish the social, spatial and other thematic commonalities between Beukes’s cyber and futurist Cape Town, futurist fantasy/magical Johannesburg and a crime-ridden Chicago that is explored through cyclical time-travelling.

Thinking with Crocodiles, Thinking Through Humans: Vulnerable, Entangled Selves in Lauren Beukes's Zoo City

ABSTRACTZoo City's (2010) author, Lauren Beukes, claims to have written her novel in response to widespread xenophobic attitudes towards refugees in South Africa. The frequent attacks made by crocodiles on these people as they attempt to enter the country by crossing the Limpopo River are a fitting, if gruesome, metaphor for such prejudice. Against this background, I read Zoo City's own crocodile as a central figure in Beukes's engagement with discourses of prejudice. The animal familiar of a murderous human, this crocodile is blatantly politicised. Anthropomorphising nonhuman animals, as Beukes does here, is generally criticised for perpetuating anthropocentric ways of looking at the world. However, I read Zoo City's crocodile in light of work carried out by scholars such as Neel Ahuja, Nandini Thiyagarajan, and Kari Weil, who suggest that this contested practice might yet be of value to wider efforts to combat prejudiced and hierarchical ways of thinking about others. Straddling the boundaries between human and nonhuman, predator and prey, Beukes's crocodile dramatises the extent to which humans and nonhumans are entangled with and connected to one another, not only through prejudiced language and imagery, but also through their shared vulnerability. Acknowledging such shared vulnerability is, I suggest, a good way for humans to begin to rethink themselves and their place in the world. Through her nonhuman animals, and in particular her crocodile, Beukes explores, then, the potential for human prejudice that has infiltrated the rest of the animal kingdom to be reappropriated as a tool for ethical progress. Indeed, if nonhumans are already present in the biopolitical fold on account of the human prejudice they bear, then they might just be able to help challenge, from the inside, the very human hierarchies of being on which prejudice is founded. This, I argue, is precisely the work performed by the complex figure of the crocodile in Beukes's Zoo City.

Guilt, guns, girls and ghettos: Adjacent futures in selected post- apartheid fantasies

Since 1994, a growing number of South African writers of young adult and crossover fiction have experimented with science fiction and fantasy as tools for anticipating potential futures. In this article, three of these works are considered: The Slayer of Shadows by Elana Bregin, Zoo City by Lauren Beukes and The Mall Rats series consisting of Deadlands and Death of a Saint by Lily Herne. The texts are initially briefly contrasted with two texts by authors based in the USA: Lauren St John’s The White Giraffe and Sarah Pinsker’s “The Trans-dimensional Horsemaster Rabbis of Mpumalanga Province” to show that the three local writers’ engagement with the South African present enables them to resist, in varying degrees, prevalent Western tendencies to see positive African futures in terms of either an idealised pre-colonial past or as the result of redemptive agency by external forces. Although almost twenty years separate the Bregin novel from the others, there are clear similarities between them: each is written by a white woman (or women) and each places a young female protagonist within a crumbling, violent and resolutely urban environment. Paradoxically, the future worlds the authors create are at once both profoundly unfamiliar and recognisably South African, perhaps lending credence to Darko Suvin’s view that good fantasy gives rise to “cognitive estrangement” (4) by which the reader is freed to explore troubling issues such as guilt and complicity at a safe emotional remove. By foregrounding and contrasting the presentation of divisive contemporary themes such as gender, race, guilt and violence in these novels, it is hoped to establish whether the repressed fears/desires they articulate are in any way indicative of social attitudes to either present experience or imagined futures and whether such attitudes have changed significantly in the twenty years since the first democratic elections.

Representations of Xenophobia and Animalisation in Zebra Crossing, Zoo City and Wolf, Wolf

SummaryThis article explores the depiction of xenophobia and animalisation in three recent South African novels to determine whether these narratives offer ways of reimagining relations with others. It is specifically interested in the depiction of encounters with those dehumanised by xenophobic discourse as well as the ways in which animals figure in these texts. The texts under discussion are: Meg Vandermerwe’s Zebra Crossing (2013), Lauren Beukes’s Zoo City (2010) and Eben Venter’s Wolf, Wolf (2013). All three novels, in unusual ways, engage with xenophobia and employ animals, animal metaphors and animalised humans in their narratives. All trouble the boundaries between self and other and centre bodies as the place from which relations with others are conducted. This article will focus on the descriptions of African migrants in these texts, and the manner in which they are animalised. It will also question the extent to which writing embodied others – be they animal or foreigner – remains a way of writing about the embodied self. Finally, this article will consider whether the use of animal metaphors disrupts humanist exhortations against xenophobia.

Portraits of South African Women in Lauren Beukes’ Writings

Abstract The aim of this paper is to study some of Lauren Beukes’ feminine characters and to draw a parallel between them and some famous South African personalities presented in her non-fiction work Maverick: Extraordinary Women from South Africa’s Past. To this end, I will analyse three of her novels, Moxyland (2008), Zoo City (2010) and The Shining Girls (2012), in order to draw attention to the part played by South African women in Apartheid and post-Apartheid society.

Information glut and conspicuous silence in Lauren Beukes’s Zoo City

In recent years, mass media representations of inner-city lives in South Africa have tended to focus on poverty and crime in ways that flatten out the subjectivity of residents. In response, a growing corpus of fiction and scholarship has sought to give voice to the complexities of life in contemporary South African cityscapes. Lauren Beukes’s 2010 thriller Zoo City takes up this task, challenging a glut of media images that spectacularize poverty in Hillbrow, Johannesburg. This article argues that while Zoo City seemingly strives to give voice to complex subjectivities amid precarious socio-economic circumstances, it simultaneously carries out a very different project. Beukes explores the stakes of the novelist’s own appropriation of suffering in a way that is markedly rare for thrillers. Through conspicuous silences, Zoo City calls attention to the invisibility of many forms of precarity and efforts to claim autonomy in Hillbrow. The novel simultaneously offers and destabilizes a sense of privileged knowledge that transcends mainstream media representations. In this way the text unsettles the authority of readers to pass judgment on the lives it depicts at the same time as it challenges readers to reassess their complicity in forms of structural violence they do not see.

SF, Infrastructure, and the Anthropocene: Reading Moxyland and Zoo City

This essay probes the relationship between nature and infrastructure in Moxyland (2008) and Zoo City (2010), SF novels by the South African writer Lauren Beukes. I show, in one vein, how “nature” and “infrastructure” are not at all opposed in the way that ecocriticism and urban studies often suggest; in these speculative fictions, nature and infrastructure coincide, such that “nature” becomes coextensive with everyday life in these texts. At the same time, the essay uses Moxyland and Zoo City to explore a problem I take to be fundamental to literary and environmental studies in Africa, namely the place of African texts and contexts in the rapidly growing body of work on the Anthropocene, humanity’s new geologic age. Not only do these novels suggest yoking discourse on the Anthropocene to the new materialisms of scholars such as Jane Bennett or Bruno Latour, but the manner in which they do so can help us think about how to make the concept accessible to literary form.

Rewriting Abject Spaces and Subjectivities in Lauren Beukes’s <i>Zoo City</i>

This examination of Zoo City (2010) by Lauren Beukes calls for a re-imagining of denigrated South African urban spaces and their inhabitants. Drawing primarily on the work of Julia Kristeva and Judith Butler, it investigates the making of abject spaces and subjectivities, suggesting that novels such as Beukes's might allow for readers to see anew so-called slums such as inner-city Hillbrow. It proposes that readers might come to know such spaces and subjectivities more intimately, bringing otherwise marginalised characters and their urban spaces more sharply into focus. This analysis of Beukes's novel considers the role of ex-centric fiction, fiction that challenges privileged centres of belonging. Ultimately, this paper explores the potential for resistance such literature might have in the face of the dehumanising impact of othering and abjectification in post-apartheid South Africa.

Dystopian Futures, Apartheid, and Postapartheid Allegories

This essay analyzes Lauren Beukes's 2010 novel, Zoo City, as a complicated set of allegories of environmental disaster, HIV/AIDS, xenophobic violence, and contemporary African identity. It argues that Zoo City, as a speculative fiction of sorts, is deeply informed by South African history and particularly the history of Johannesburg in both the apartheid and postapartheid eras. The central conceit of the novel, the “animalled,” or “zoos,” marks a working through of the persistence of forms of stigmatization, violence, and exclusion in its present.

The girls who don’t die: subversions of gender and genre in recent fiction by Lauren Beukes

This article attempts to homogenize gender theory and genre studies in order to build a suitable lens for analyses of Beukes’ texts. The central argument posits two of her novels, Zoo City and The Shining Girls, as trans-gressive examples of crime fiction, suggesting that the writer crosses conceptual borders by disrupting the mutually defining expectations of gender and genre. The significance of these acts of disruption is, primarily, that of refusing erasure: the bodies and lives of women are often, ironically, marginalized in their very scripting and narration. Secondly, there is the suggestion that the disruption of clean-cut generic expectations is an “act of genre” (Jacques Derrida Acts of Literature) which performs and, embodies the contextual shifts within contemporary South African literature and the cultural imaginary.

“There are no monsters, it’s just us”: An interview with Lauren Beukes

ABSTRACTLauren Beukes is an award-winning, internationally best-selling South African author who has gained a reputation for crossing genres and styles. Born in Johannesburg, Beukes currently lives in Cape Town, where she writes novels, comics, screenplays, TV shows and journalism. Her latest novel, Broken monsters, won Best Suspense Novel in the American Library Association’s 2015 Reading List and was recently recommended by George R.R. Martin on a list of nine books to read. Her previous novel, The shining girls, has won multiple awards, including the University of Johannesburg Prize and the Exclusive Books Bookseller’s Choice Award. Zoo City won the Arthur C. Clarke Award. I first met Beukes in early 2015 when she was doing research for her new novel at the National English Literary Museum in Grahamstown. The discussion in this interview focuses not on the ideas for her next project, but instead on the artistic motifs, philosophical issues and social themes that recur throughout her first four novels. This conversation was recorded on 13 August 2015, and took place at Beukes’s home in Tamboerskloof, Cape Town.

Planning the Future: Scenario Planning, Infrastructural Time, and South African Fiction

This essay examines the impact that scenario planning has had on recent South African fiction. It first investigates how the popular use of scenario planning disseminated certain ideas about the timescale of infrastructural growth. These ideas, I argue, were vital tools in eliciting a consensus for structural adjustment policies among South Africa’s ruling elite. The essay’s second half then turns to Lauren Beukes’s science-fiction novel Zoo City . Beukes’s novel, I show, mimics scenario planning’s approach to capitalist time, but it does so in order to suggest that scenario planning misses the deeper, contradictory modes of temporality that inhere in infrastructure.