Abstract
This introductory chapter examines the contemporary state of post-apartheid South Africa by looking at the massacre at the Marikana platinum mines as an example of the failures to bring about a “new” South Africa or “rainbow” nation. It offers a brief overview of the colonial and apartheid periods before looking at the efforts to transform South African society away from its violent past through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and other efforts. Then the chapter outlines the potential of contemporary South African literature to foster new ways of thinking and relating, especially those novels featuring non-human animals and desire. It also scopes out the project’s contributions to the fields of animal studies, postcolonial studies, biopolitics, ecocriticism, and Deleuze studies.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Bibliography
Adams, Carol J. The Pornography of Meat. New York: Continuum, 2003.
———. The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory. 20th Anniv. edition. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015.
Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Heller-Roazen, Daniel. Stanford University Press, 1998.
Armstrong, Philip. “The Postcolonial Animal.” Society & Animals 10, no. 4 (2002): 413–19. doi: 10.1163/156853002320936890.
———. What Animals Mean in the Fiction of Modernity. 1st edition. London; New York, NY: Routledge, 2008.
Asad, Talal. “What Do Human Rights Do? An Anthropological Enquiry.” Theory & Event 4, no. 4 (2000).
Attridge, Derek. J. M. 2005. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading: Literature in the Event. Chicago, University of Chicago Press.
Baker, Steve. Picturing the Beast: Animals, Identity, and Representation. Manchester University Press, 1993.
Beckman, Frida. Between Desire and Pleasure: A Deleuzian Theory of Sexuality. 1st edition. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013.
Bensmaïa, Réda. “Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Political in Rachid Boudjedra’s L’Escargot Entêté.” In Postcolonial Literatures and Deleuze: Colonial Pasts, Differential Futures. edited by L. Burns and B. Kaiser. 2012 edition, 165–80. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire; New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
———. “Foreword: The Kafka Effect.” In Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature by Gilles Deleuze and Fèlix Guattari, ix–xxi. Translated by Dana Polan. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1986.
Best, Steven. “The Killing Fields of South Africa: Eco-Wars, Species Apartheid, and Total Liberation.” Fast Capitalism 2, no. 2. Accessed September 21, 2016. https://www.uta.edu/huma/agger/fastcapitalism/2_2/best.html.
———. “The Rise of Critical Animal Studies: Putting Theory into Action and Animal Liberation into Higher Education.” Journal for Critical Animal Studies 7, no. 1 (2009): 9–52.
Bhabha, Homi K. “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse.” In The Location of Culture, 121–31. London; New York, Routledge, 1994.
Bignall, Simone. “Deleuze and Foucault on Desire and Power.” Angelaki 13, no. 1 (April 1, 2008): 127–47.
Blomkamp, Neill. 2009. District 9. Tri-Star. https://www.amazon.com/District-9-Single-Disc-Jason-Cope/dp/B002SJIO4A/ref=sr_1_1?s=movies-tv&ie=UTF8&qid=1475090579&sr=1–1&keywords=district+9&refinements=p_n_format_browse-bin%3A2650304011.
Boggs, Colleen Glenney. Animalia Americana: Animal Representations and Biopolitical Subjectivity. New York, Columbia University Press, 2013.
Braidotti, Rosi. “Animals, Anomalies, and Inorganic Others.” PMLA 124, no. 2 (2009): 526–32.
———. Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006.
Brown, Wendy, and Janet Halley, eds. Left Legalism/Left Critique. Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2002.
Buchanan, Ian. “The Little Hans Assemblage.” Visual Arts Research 39, no. 1 (2013): 9–17. doi: 10.5406/visuartsrese.39.1.0009.
Burns, L., and B. Kaiser, eds. Postcolonial Literatures and Deleuze: Colonial Pasts, Differential Futures. 2012 edition. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire; New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
Caminero-Santangelo, Byron, and Garth Andrew Myers, eds. Environment at the Margins: Literary and Environmental Studies in Africa. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2011. http://proxy.library.vcu.edu/login?url=http://site.ebrary.com/lib/vacommonwealth/Doc?id=10509946.
Carruthers, Jane. “Hunter of Elephants, Take Your Bow!: A Historical Analysis of Nonfiction Writing About Elephant Hunting in Southern Africa.” In Environment at the Margins: Literary and Environmental Studies in Africa. Edited by Byron Caminero-Santangelo and Garth Andrew Myers. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2011. http://proxy.library.vcu.edu/login?url=http://site.ebrary.com/lib/vacommonwealth/Doc?id=10509946.
Coetzee, J.M.Disgrace: A Novel. New York, Penguin Books, 1999.
———. “Farm Novel and ‘Plaasroman’ in South Africa.” English in Africa 13, no. 2 (1986): 1–19.
———. "Triangular Structures of Desire in Advertising." Critical Arts 1, no. 2 (June 1, 1980): 34–41.
Crais, Clifton C. White Supremacy and Black Resistance in Pre-Industrial South Africa: The Making of the Colonial Order in the Eastern Cape, 1770–1865. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
Davies, Nick. “Marikana Massacre: The Untold Story of the Strike Leader Who Died for Workers’ Rights.” The Guardian, May 19, 2015, sec. World news. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/may/19/marikana-massacre-untold-story-strike-leader-died-workers-rights.
Davies, Oliver, and Nick Holmes. “Revealed: The Criminals Making Millions from Illegal Wildlife Trafficking.” The Guardian, September 26, 2016, sec. Environment. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/sep/26/revealed-the-criminals-making-millions-from-illegal-wildlife-trafficking.
De La Cadena, Marisol. “Indigenous Cosmopolitics in The Andes: Conceptual Reflections beyond ‘Politics.’” Cultural Anthropology 25, no. 2 (May 1, 2010): 334–70. doi: 10.1111/j.1548-1360.2010.01061.x.
Deckha, Maneesha. “Toward a Postcolonial, Posthumanist Feminist Theory: Centralizing Race and Culture in Feminist Work on Nonhuman Animals.” Hypatia 27, no. 3 (August 1, 2012): 527–45. doi: 10.1111/j.1527-2001.2012.01290.x.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1987.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Fèlix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. New York, Viking Press, 1977.
———. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Translated by Dana Polan. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1986.
DeLoughrey, Elizabeth, and George B. Handley, eds. Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment. 1st edition. New York, Oxford University Press, 2011.
DeMello, Margo. Animals and Society: An Introduction to Human-Animal Studies. Columbia University Press, 2012.
Derrida, Jacques. “The Animal that Therefore I Am (More to Follow).” Translated by David Wills.Critical Inquiry 28, no. 2 (2002): 369–418.
Derrida, Jacques, and Anne Dufourmantelle. Of Hospitality. Translated by Rachel Bowlby. 1st edition. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000.
Desai, Rehad. Miners Shot Down. Documentary, History, News. Uhuru Productions, 2014.
Duiker, K. Sello. Thirteen Cents: A Novel. Ohio University Press, 2013.
Eke, Maureen, Simon Lewis, and Abioseh Porter. “Introduction.” Journal of the African Literature Association 8, no. 2 (January 1, 2014): 3–9. doi: 10.1080/21674736.2014.11690223.
Foucault, Michel. “17 March 1976 Lecture.” In “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976. Edited by Mauro Bertani, Alessandro Fontana, and François Ewald. Translated by David Macey. 239–64. New York, Picador, 2003.
———. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979. Edited by Michel Senellart. Translated by Graham Burchell. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
Foucault, Michel, and Gilles Deleuze. “Intellectuals and Power.” In Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, 205–17. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980.
Gaard, Greta, ed. Ecofeminism: Women, Animals, Nature. Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 1993.
———. “Living Interconnections with Animals and Nature.” In Ecofeminism: Women, Animals, Nature. edited by Greta Gaard, 1–12. Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 1993.
Garuba, Harry. “On Animism, Modernity/Colonialism, and the African Order of Knowledge: Provisional Reflections.” In Contested Ecologies: Dialogues in the South on Nature and Knowledge. Edited by Lesley Green, 42–51. Cape Town: Human Sciences Research Council, 2013.
Gikandi, Simon. “Poststructuralism and Postcolonial Discourse.” In The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies. Edited by Neil Lazarus, 97–119. Cambridge; New York, Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Graham, Lucy. “South Africa after Twenty Years of Democracy.” Interventions 18, no. 6 (November 1, 2016): 767–71. doi: 10.1080/1369801X.2016.1193441.
Graham, Lucy Valerie. State of Peril: Race and Rape in South African Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.
Gruen, Lori. “Dismantling Oppression: An Analysis of the Connection Between Women and Animals.” In Ecofeminism: Women, Animals, Nature. edited by Greta Gaard, 60–90. Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 1993.
Hamilton, Grant. On Representation: Deleuze and Coetzee on the Colonized Subject. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2011.
Haraway, Donna. When Species Meet. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2008.
Hegel, G.F.W. Lectures on the Philosophy of World History. In Race and the Enlightenment: A Reader. ed. Chukwudi Eze Emmanuel, 109–153. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1997 [1822].
Heyns, Michiel. The Reluctant Passenger. Jeppestown: Jonathan Ball, 2003. http://www.jonathanball.co.za/index.php/component/virtuemart/the-reluctant-passenger-ebook-detail?Itemid=6.
Hooks, Bell. “Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance.” In Black Looks: Race and Representation. 1st edition, 21–40. Boston, MA: South End Press, 1992.
Huggan, Graham, and Helen Tiffin. Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment. 1st edition. London; New York, Routledge, 2010.
Irlam, Shaun. “Unraveling the Rainbow: The Remission of Nation in Post-Apartheid Literature.” The South Atlantic Quarterly 103, no. 4 (September 16, 2004): 695–718.
Jaising, Shakti. “Reconstructing Apartheid, Redefining Racism: The South African Truth Commission and Its Representations.” Interventions 16, no. 1 (January 2, 2014): 117–34. doi: 10.1080/1369801X.2012.755029.
Janz, Bruce B. “Forget Deleuze.” In Postcolonial Literatures and Deleuze: Colonial Pasts, Differential Futures. edited by L. Burns and B. Kaiser. 2012 edition, 21–36. Basingstoke, Hampshire, New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
Jolly, Rosemary. “Going to the Dogs: Humanity in J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, The Lives of Animals, and South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission.” In J.M. Coetzee and the Idea of the Public Intellectual. edited by Jane Poyner, 148–71. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2006.
———. “Writing Desire Responsibly.” In J.M. Coetzee in Context and Theory. edited by Elleke Boehmer, Robert Eaglestone, and Katy Iddiols, 93–111. London: Continuum, 2009.
Kafka, Franz. Metamorphosis and Other Stories. Translated by Michael Hofmann. Reprint edition. New York, Penguin Classics, 2008.
Landsman, Anne. The Devil’s Chimney: A Novel. First edition. New York, Soho Pr Inc, 1997.
Leithead, Alastair. “Are Lion Hunters in South Africa Shooting Tame Animals?” BBC News, September 9, 2016, sec. Africa. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-37295358.
Lingis, Alphonso. “Bestiality.” Symploke 6, no. 1 (February 24, 2005): 56–71. doi: 10.1353/sym.2005.0078.
Lockett, Cecily. “Feminsim(s) and Writing in English in South Africa.” In South African Feminisms: Writing, Theory, and Criticism, 1990–1994. Edited by M.J. Daymond, 3–26. Routledge, 2013.
Magubane, Bernard. Race and the Construction of the Dispensable Other. Pretoria: Unisa Press, 2007.
Mamdani, Mahmood. “Amnesty or Impunity? A Preliminary Critique of the Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa (TRC).” Diacritics 32, no. 3 (February 21, 2005): 33–59.
Mbembe, Achille. “Necropolitics.” Public Culture 15, no. 1 (January 2003): 11–40.
———. On the Postcolony. Berkeley, University of California Press, 2001.
McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. 1st edition. New York, Routledge, 1995.
McGregor, Deborah. “Coming Full Circle: Indigenous Knowledge, Environment, and Our Future.” American Indian Quarterly 28, no. 3–4 (2004): 385.
Mda, Zakes. Fools, Bells and the Habit of Eating: Three Satires. Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2002.
———. The Heart of Redness. New York, Picador, 2000.
———. The Whale Caller. Picador, 2005.
Meeran, Zinaid. Tanuki Ichiban. Sunnyside: Jacana Media, 2012.
Mokuku, T., and C. Mokuku. “The Role of Indigenous Knowledge in Biodiversity Conservation in the Lesotho Highlands: Exploring Indigenous Epistemology.” Southern African Journal of Environmental Education 21, no. 0 (January 1, 2004): 37–49.
Ndebele, Njabulo S. "Preface to a Dissertation: Fools and Other Stories." Njabulo Ndebele, January 1, 1983. http://www.njabulondebele.co.za/work/preface-to-a-dissertation-fools-and-other-stories/.
———. “To Be or Not to Be: No Longer at Ease.” Arts and Humanities in Higher Education 15, no. 1 (February 1, 2016): 15–28. doi: 10.1177/1474022215613610.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2015.
Nixon, Rob. “Environmentalism and Postcolonialism.” In African Literature: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory Edited by Tejumola Olaniyan and Ato Quayson. 1st edition, 715–23. Malden, MA; Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2007.
———. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2011.
Peires, Jeffrey B. The Dead Will Arise: Nongqawuse and the Great Xhosa Cattle-Killing Movement of 1856–7. Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1989.
Pickover, Michelè. Animal Rights in South Africa. Cape Town: Double Storey Books, 2005.
Plumwood, Val. “Decolonizing Relationships with Nature.” In Decolonizing Nature: Strategies for Conservation in a Post-Colonial Era. edited by William Mark Adams and Martin Mulligan, 51–78. Sterling: Earthscan, 2003.
Poyner, Jane, ed. J.M. Coetzee and the Idea of the Public Intellectual. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2006.
Pucherova, Dobrota. The Ethics of Dissident Desire in Southern African Writing. Trier: WVT, 2011.
Robinson, Andrew, and Simon Tormey. “Living in Smooth Space: Deleuze, Postcolonialism and the Subaltern.” In Deleuze and the Postcolonial. edited by Simone Bignall and Paul Patton, 20–40. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010. /core/books/deleuze-and-the-postcolonial/postcolonial-theory-and-the-geographical-materialism-of-desire/778FD0F16A2EA35FD1C68DB1DA35481C.
Shapiro, Kenneth, and Margo DeMello. “The State of Human-Animal Studies.” Society and Animals 18, no. 3 (July 1, 2010): 307–18. doi: 10.1163/156853010X510807.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader. edited by Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, 1st edition, 66–109. New York, Columbia University Press, 1994.
Stengers, Isabelle. “The Cosmopolitical Proposal.” In Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy. Edited by Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel. First edition. 994–1004. Cambridge, Mass: Karlsruhe, Germany: MIT Press, 2005.
Thiele, Kathrin. “The World with(out) Others, or How to Unlearn the Desire for the Other.” In Postcolonial Literatures and Deleuze: Colonial Pasts, Differential Futures. Edited by L. Burns and B. Kaiser. 2012 edition, 55–75. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
Tutu, Desmond. No Future Without Forgiveness. New York, Image, 2000.
Wicomb, Zoë. “To Hear the Variety of Discourses.” In South African Feminisms: Writing, Theory, and Criticism, 1990–1994. Edited by M.J. Daymond, 45–56. New York, Routledge, 2013.
Wolfe, Cary. Before the Law: Humans and Other Animals in a Biopolitical Frame. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2013.
———. What Is Posthumanism? U of Minnesota Press, 2010.
Woodward, Wendy. “Beyond Fixed Geographies of the Self Counterhegemonic Selves and Symbolic Spaces in Achmat Dangor’s ‘Kafka’s Curse’ and Anne Landsman’s the Devil’s Chimney.” Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa 12, no. 2 (January 1, 2000): 21–37. doi: 10.1080/1013929X.2000.9678082.
———. The Animal Gaze: Animal Subjectivities in Southern African Narratives. Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2008.
Wright, Laura. Wilderness into Civilized Shapes: Reading the Postcolonial Environment. Athens, University of Georgia Press, 2010.
Young, Robert J.C. “Colonialism and the Desiring Machine.” In Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race. 1st edition, 151–72. London: Routledge, 1995.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Price, J.D. (2017). Introduction: Sameness and Difference in the “New” South Africa—Desire and Nonhuman Resistance. In: Animals and Desire in South African Fiction. Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-56726-6_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-56726-6_1
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-56725-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-56726-6
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)