Paper short abstract:

This paper charts a genealogy of conflicting literary representations of water disasters and ecological recuperation in South Africa from the colonial era to the present.

Paper long abstract:

This paper charts a genealogy of conflicting literary representations of water disasters and ecological recuperation in South Africa. Colonial era representations figured the ocean as a site of agentive opposition to white settlers; the sixteenth-century Portuguese Lusiads personified the waters and rocks around the Cape of Good Hope as demons bent on preventing Europeans from landing, while the nineteenth-century Xhosa Prophecy promised that the ancestors would be reborn and the whites driven into the sea if the Xhosa people slaughtered their own cattle. These images of the ocean as a hostile force to whites persisted through the apartheid era. Contrastingly, the twentieth century South African farm novel evoked white labor and landscapes empty of indigenous people to frame white settlers as the true stewards of the land, and by extension, to legitimize colonialism and apartheid. The anti-apartheid novelist Nadine Gordimer's celebrated "eco" novel The Conservationist and short s

tory "Loot" use flood, rainstorm, and tidal wave to wash away white landowners and to disrupt the territorial grids of apartheid's spatial power. In this paper, I query the aesthetic, political, and environmental implications of figuring natural disaster as the agent of social change, particularly now, in an era wherein the threat of rising oceans and sinking freshwaters is increasingly suffered by the very subjects that Gordimer's imagined floods sought to liberate.