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

Abstract

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.

Keywords:

• Lauren Beukes
• Zoo City
• Hillbrow
• inner city
• subjectivity
• appropriation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. For a few examples, see Bremner (1998), Beall, Crankshaw, and Parnell (2000) and Crankshaw and Parnell (2004).

2. Martin Murray (2008) discusses this problem in Taming the Disorderly City. For a more recent example, see the regeneration plan on the City of Johannesburg’s 2015 website, which trumpets the goal of “discouraging ‘sinkholes’, meaning properties that are abandoned, overcrowded, or poorly maintained, and which in turn ‘pull down’ the value of entire city blocks”.

3. A number of scholars and reviewers have made this point, including Sofianos (2013, 113) and Graham (1999, 74).

4. Y Culture, also called loxion kulcha (a contraction of “location culture”), is a Johannesburg youth culture exemplified by the radio station YFM and Y Magazine. For a detailed analysis, see Nuttall (2008).