Scratching the surface: the home and the haptic in Lauren Beukes's Zoo city and elsewhere

ABSTRACT

This paper deploys the haptic, and more broadly speaking, notions of multisensory reading and spectatorship to reconfigure perceptions of home. It explores configurations of home in the practice of the late French-Israeli visual artist, Absalon, to draw tropes of “complicity” and “contagion” into an intersection with discourses of moral hygiene arising from the modernist preoccupation with denuded surface in the history of architecture. It then goes on to read a postapartheid South African text, Lauren Beukes's Zoo city (2010), through the lens of these concerns. Beukes's text, it claims, can be made to precipitate the historicity of the white suburban home under apartheid. The novel offers alternative iterations of domesticity, however, as metonymies of contagion shift into metonymies of conviviality. The final section of the paper investigates the vulnerability of the home against the background of the 2014 Israeli war on Gaza and its assault on the built environment. It explores an art exhibition, Postcards for Gaza, staged by the dissident Israeli organization, Zochrot, in the context of a previous military assault on Gaza in 2008. Here the reworking of photographic surface is made to gesture towards the possibility of political reparation in an alternate modality of complicity that Mark Sanders parses as “human-foldedness” (Sanders 2002).

Keywords:

• haptic in literature
• multisensory reading
• surface
• Absalon
• modernist architecture
• Lauren Beukes
• Zoo city
• Postcards to Gaza art exhibition

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Louise Bethlehem

Louise Bethlehem is Senior Lecturer in the English Department and former Chair of the Program in Cultural Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her book, Skin tight: apartheid literary culture and its aftermath (Unisa Press, Brill 2006) was published in Hebrew translation in 2011. She has co-edited six volumes in the field of South African literature, African Studies and Cultural Studies including South Africa in the global imaginary, co-edited with Leon de Kock and Sonja Laden (Unisa 2004); Violence & Non-Violence in Africa, co-edited with Pal Ahluwalia and Ruth Ginio (Routledge 2007); and Rethinking labour in Africa, past and present co-edited with Lynn Schler and Galia Sabar (Routledge 2010). Most recently, she co-edited a special edition of Critical arts together with Ashleigh Harris, titled “Unruly pedagogies, migratory interventions: Unsettling cultural studies” (26(2) 2012). In December 2013, she was awarded a prestigious European Research Council Consolidators Grant for a five-year project titled “Apartheid—The Global Itinerary: South African Cultural Formations in Transnational Circulation 1948–1990”.