Paper short abstract:

This paper provides a literary analysis of the critical dystopia in Imraan Coovdia's A Spy in Time (2018).

Paper long abstract:

This paper provides a literary analysis of Imraan Coovadia’s A Spy in Time (2018). This text, set in a post-apocalyptic South Africa, deals with the issues of race and class, so entrenched into the South African social fabric. In addition to exploring the above, this paper focuses on the dual nature and role of technology in the South African dystopian genre. While depicted as a powerful tool, technology often functions to serve the needs of those who wield its power, rendering the “other” powerless. Coovadia’s narrative weaves a tale of espionage across various times and spaces. This paper also explores post-humanism as depicted through a dystopian lens. The notion of the critical dystopia and the dual nature that it reflects is also explored in this discussion. Coovadia’s narrative exists at the impasse between the past and the present; the old and the new, through the trope of time travel, which is explored during the course of this analysis.

Paper short abstract:

The aim of this article is to map the way history, crime fiction and the future intersect in Triangulum by Masande Ntshanga (2019) and A Spy in Time by Imraan Coovadia (2018) and to provide hypotheses on what this reveals on the South African contemporary literary landscape.

Paper long abstract:

Masande Ntshanga’s second novel, Triangulum (2019), starts with a fictional foreword by a former science fiction writer, Naomi Buthelezi, explaining that she got hold of a set of documents which she is about to publish under the name Triangulum in 2043, and that these documents predict the end of the world in 2050. The set of documents comprises “a written record in the form of a memoir, followed by what appears to be a work of autofiction, as well as a set of digital recordings.” (3) The book is then separated into several sections that read like a bildungsroman and a spy novel exploring South Africa’s history, each section leaving on its wake a trail of signs which (mis)lead the reader to the book’s coda. Triangulum thus takes the form of a metafictional futuristic investigation, much like A Spy in Time by Imraan Coovadia (2018). Both novels therefore stand at the crossroad of literary innovation (speculative fiction remains marginal in South Africa despite Lauren Beuke’s popularization of the genre and it has only been recently appropriated by non-white authors) and crime fiction, a more popular genre in South Africa which is very much concerned with investigating the country’s troubled past under a (non)fictional lens. The aim of this article is therefore to map the way history, crime fiction and the future intersect in Triangulum and A Spy in Time and to provide hypotheses on what this reveals on the South African contemporary literary landscape.

Paper short abstract:

Focusing on Zimbabwean author Tsitsi Dangarembga's novel This Mournable Body (2018), a sequel to Nervous Conditions (1988), one of the most significant African Bildungsromane, the paper discusses how the promises of a postcolonial future fall short both on an individual and a collective level.

Paper long abstract:

Zimbabwean author Tsitsi Dangarembga's This Mournable Body (2018), shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize, was published exactly thirty years after her seminal novel, Nervous Conditions (1988), celebrated as one of the most significant African female Bildungsromane to date. The protagonist of both novels is Tambudzai, who grows from a promising, hopeful young girl in 1960's Rhodesia, on the brink of postcolonial independence, to a disillusioned, impoverished middle-aged woman without a proper job, prospects or any care for others.

Focusing on This Mournable Body, I will discuss how the great promise of independence falls short not only for Zimbabwe but also for Tambu herself, resulting in an anticlimactic conclusion for both. By drawing on and twisting Teju Cole's essay “Unmournable Bodies”, discussing the hierarchy of suffering as a phenomenon that is detrimental to non-white bodies, Dangarembga attempts to present Tambu's life as grievable. However, it is not through a process of formation and linear development required of the Bildungsroman genre that Tambu reaches the status of grievability. Although Nervous Conditions presented her as possessing the makings of future greatness, This Mournable Body introduces a person whose search for a new, postcolonial selfhood has left her embittered and lacking the ability to be kind to others. In my paper, I will argue that it is precisely Tambu's lack of goodness that should be seen as the source of her own grievability – a phenomenon that may be understood as particular to the postcolonial Bildungsroman in its specific historical setting.

Paper short abstract:

We will analyse how Deon Meyer's worldwide success Fever combines science fiction, utopia and dystopia, more contemporary and global genres, if often considered minor, and the South African tradition of the pastoral. Does his take on the plaasroman do away with its national(istic) connotations?

Paper long abstract:

Deon Meyer’s 2017 novel Fever (Koors, 2016) has been acclaimed worldwide in particular for its rather eerie prescience: in a world struck by a pandemic caused by a Coronavirus perhaps transmitted by bats, the novel has, since 2020, been avidly re-read for clues that may have been missed to prevent the world from coming to a sudden standstill. More accustomed to thrillers and crime novels, the author took great care to propose a scientifically credible hypothesis. Moreover, the novel verges on science fiction as the plot revolves around technology and its complex relationship with ecology: a threat to the planet’s equilibrium, which has become a post-apocalyptic dystopia, technology might nevertheless help rebuild a utopian society at the tip of the continent. However, the utopia put forward by the - Afrikaner - protagonist has not been assessed in light of the tradition of pastoral narratives in South Africa, and particularly its Afrikaans avatar, the plaasroman. Yet, the setting, so near the notorious stronghold of Afrikanerdom, Orania, or the characters crossing the country on a pilgrimage to build a New Jerusalem in a post-apocalyptic, and supposedly post-apartheid, South Africa, make the connection hard to miss. We shall therefore analyse the novel’s take on the plaasroman, which although regularly parodied and rewritten, remains associated with the exaltation of a specific white African identity. Ultimately, it will assess whose future seems to emerge from Meyer's novel, a worldwide success, but irreducibly anchored in a genre and a language with strong geographical and political connotations.