Anomalous, Containerized and Inundating Waters: Thinking from the Cape and through Blue Focalization with K. Sello Duiker’s Thirteen Cents

Abstract

K. Sello Duiker’s novel Thirteen Cents focalizes water in profound ways from the spatial vantage point of the Cape Peninsula, a location that has been the setting of various decisive episodes in what Isabel Hofmeyr describes as “hydrocolonialism.” Figuring water’s anomalous properties and the procedures of containerization that have advanced the capitalist world-system consuming the South, the novel offers the material metaphor of inundation with which to think through the persistently racialised structures of global capitalism as they combine with the emergent planetary crisis. Restoring materiality to this metaphor, the novel advances apprehension of the precarity imposed upon the South as the consumption of its goods returns in amplified harms. It is instructive also on how reading itself might be performed as an immersive and diffractive methodology toward a realization of the “planetary humanism” that Paul Gilroy sees emerging from “sea-level theory.”

KEYWORDS:

• Anthropocene
• blue humanities
• global South
• oceanic South
• racial capitalism
• South African literature

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 “All of this stickiness comes about”, Jha (2015, n.p.) elaborates, “because, at the molecular level, water molecules are attracted to each other to an extent we do not see with other liquids.”

2 On water’s anomalousness, see Ball (1999), Linton (2010), Jha (2015).

3 On how the properties of water are appropriated as vehicle for capitalism in metaphors that naturalise its movements as that which flows and circulates, see MacLeod (2013).

4 For a history of “the box” that “made the world smaller and the world economy bigger”, see Levinson (2006).

5 For a fictional depiction of District Six before its demolition, see La Guma (1967), which notably ends with a symbolic anticipation of the inundation that Thirteen Cents realizes.