Lauren Beukes’s post-apartheid dystopia: inhabiting Moxyland

Abstract

This article reads South African science-fiction writer Lauren Beukes’s first novel, Moxyland (2008), set in a futuristic Cape Town, from the perspective of Lindsay Bremner’s notion of “citiness”, asking how cities produce the modernity of the subjects who inhabit them. The novel is remarkable for its dependence on the social geography of the South African city. The article charts Beukes’s resolutely mobile characters as they negotiate the spatial itineraries and technologies of governance in which they are embedded. It explores how Beukes’s futuristic urban setting fuses punitive forms of digital technology with the biopolitical regulation of social relations in an unsettling reprise of the apartheid groundplan. The analysis relates Moxyland to discussions of African city textualities – a critical rubric introduced by Ranka Primorac in this journal to signal the interplay of urban and textual networks in constituting the African city.

Keywords:

• Lauren Beukes
• post-apartheid literature
• biopolitics
• HIV/AIDS
• dystopian fiction
• science fiction

Acknowledgments

This paper was presented in a different form at the African Cities Conference, the African Centre for Cities, University of Cape Town, 7–9 September 2011, as well as at the Department of English, the University of Stellenbosch, 10 April 2013. My thanks go to Edgar Pieterse, Jennifer Robinson, Louise Green and Megan Jones for their generous responses in these various settings. I had the opportunity to present my work on Beukes as a visiting scholar at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research in April 2013. Thanks are due to Sarah Nuttall for this invitation and to all my interlocutors in the WISER colloquium for a riveting conversation. Brian McHale and the anonymous reviewers of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing made incisive contributions to this paper. I appreciate their suggestions. Lastly, I want to acknowledge the Harry S. Truman Institute for the Advancement of Peace at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem for supporting this research project.

Notes

1. In contemporary South Africa, ‘smileys’ refer to sheep’s heads, which are often roasted by pavement vendors and consumed in informal pavement settings.

2. My choice of the term “sovereignty” to denote hegemonic authority over territory invokes it as a synecdoche for a certain manner of thinking about governance in political philosophy. More specifically, my recourse to sovereignty relies on Giorgio Agamben’s spatialization of the state of exception in his identification of the camp as the “nomos of the modern” (1998, 166).

3. For a commemoration of the 2 September 1989 protest, where purple dye was used to mark protesters for later identification and arrest, see http://heritage.thetimes.co.za/memorials/WC/ThePurpleShallGovern/.

4. The literature on HIV/AIDS in South Africa is enormous. See also, inter alia, Posel (2005), Cameron (2005) and Fassin (2007). For an account of the suffering body of the AIDS patient and the city in particular, see Le Marcis (2008). Neville Hoad’s (2004) reading of Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow offers an important analysis of contagion, bodily fluids, AIDS and mourning in urban South Africa.

5. The paradigmatic, notoriously racist, exploration of contagion through so-called “miscegenation” is Sarah Gertrude Millin’s God’s Step-Children (1951), first published in 1924.