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Abstract
Lauren Beukes’ latest novels—The Shining Girls (2013) and Broken Monsters (2014)—present forays into new generic and geopolitical spaces, shifting from the Joburg and Cape Town-based “allegorical apartheids” of the science-fictional texts Moxyland (2008) and Zoo City (2010) to supernatural crime novels set in dystopian American cities. This paper explores the productive tension between the global and the local in her body of work, framed within the concepts of “developing world” science fiction and the figure of the hybrid. I argue that the esthetics and generic conventions of “cyberpunk” often associated with Beukes animate a seemingly ubiquitous dystopian space. Her writing explores the dissemination of commercial icons, visual fads, and digital pop-objects around and within global bodies: networked, linked electronically, and sometimes physically in what I suggest comes to form the illusion of a digital, dystopian everywhere, relentlessly performing transcendence of locality.
Notes
1 Beukes, Moxyland.
2 Beukes, “About,” http://laurenbeukes.com, online.
3 See, for instance, Leon De Kock’s recent discussion of the politics of the crime novel in “From the Subject of Evil to the Evil Subject: ‘Cultural Difference’ in Postapartheid South African Crime Fiction.”
4 Beukes, Broken Monsters, 358.
5 Ibid., 364.
6 Visagie, “Global Capitalism and a Dystopian South Africa,” 107.
7 Beukes, The Shining Girls.
8 Smith, Globalization, Utopia and Postcolonial Science Fiction, 162.
9 Beukes, “Interview: Lauren Beukes,” online.
10 Beukes, Zoo City, 60.
11 Ibid., 91.
12 Sofianos, “Magical Nightmare Jo’burg,” 114.
13 Beukes, “Lauren Beukes on ‘Broken Monsters,’” online.
14 Beukes, Broken Monsters, 393.
15 Ibid., 412.
16 Ibid., 398–9.
17 Kelly, “Broken Monsters by Lauren Beukes Review—The Creativity of Violence,” online.
18 Ansell, “Behind all the Monkey Business,” online.
19 Ghosh, The Calcutta Chromosome.
20 Beukes, “Behind all the Monkey Business,” online.
21 Beukes, “The Big Idea: Lauren Beukes,” online.
22 Beukes, commenting on “Research on Zoo City,” online.
23 Beukes, Zoo City, 111.
24 Ghosh, Calcutta Chromosome, 4.
25 Milani, “Reincarnation for Self-improvement,” online.
26 Ghosh, Calcutta Chromosome, 104–5.
27 Chakrabarty, “Symposium on Science Fiction and Globalization,” 375.
28 In his complex reading of the utopian/dystopian trends in South African literature, Visagie suggests that dystopian texts are more organically “native” within “contemporary white writing in South Africa”: an intuitive analysis to bring to bear on Beukes’ work. See “Global Capitalism and a Dystopian South Africa,” 95.
29 Butler, “Postmodernism and Science Fiction,” 141.
30 Beukes, Moxyland, 7.
31 Ibid., 67.
32 Ibid.,13.
33 Vodanovich et al., “Research Commentary: Digital Natives and Ubiquitous Information Systems,” 711.
34 Latour, We Have Never Been Modern.
35 Cohen, A Body Worth Defending: Immunity, Biopolitics, and the Apotheosis of the Modern Body, 12.
36 Kapstein, “Coffins, Corpses and Wheelchairs: Mass Hysteria and Postcolonial Constitutions,” 57.
37 Kapstein, “A Culture of Tourism: Branding the Nation in a Global Market,” 111–2.
38 Ibid.,112.
39 Beukes, “Moxyland’s Stem Cells,” 312.
40 Beukes, “Interview: Lauren Beukes,” online.
41 Visagie, “Global Capitalism and a Dystopian South Africa,” 108.
42 Nance, “Lauren Beukes on Broken Monsters,” online.
43 Beukes, Broken Monsters, 436.
44 Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future, 12.
45 Ibid., 205.
46 Ibid., 15.
47 Ibid., 164.
48 Beukes, Zoo City, 96.
49 Ibid.
50 Ibid., 94.
51 Beukes, Zoo City, 62.
52 Cotter, “The Beast in the Human, and Vice Versa,” online.
53 Amis, New Maps of Hell: A Survey of Science Fiction, 22.
54 Mntambo, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CcTK7cOEUyw&app=desktop, online.
55 Mntambo, “Nandipha Mntambo: In Her Skin,” online.
56 Beukes, Moxyland, 166.
57 Beukes, Broken Monsters, 413.
58 Schwartz, “Museum Kills Live Exhibit,” online.
59 Ibid.
60 Murray, City of Extremes, 21–2.
61 Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future, 15.
62 Catts, “Museum Kills Live Exhibit,” online.
63 Beukes, Broken Monsters, 412.
64 Ibid.
65 Ibid., 358.
66 Smith, Globalization, Utopia and Postcolonial Science Fiction, 182.
67 Beukes, “Interview: Lauren Beukes,” online.
68 Ibid.
69 Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future, 14.
70 Smith, Globalization, Utopia and Postcolonial Science Fiction, 164.
71 Beukes, “Interview: Lauren Beukes,” online.
72 Beukes, “Lauren Beukes on ‘Broken Monsters,’” online.