Half ’n Half: Mytho-Historical and Spatial Entanglements in Charlie Human’sApocalypse Now NowandKill Baxter
Year: 2016
Type: article
Abstract: SummarySince 2011, the genre of South African speculative fiction has seen a significant surfacing of new writers working within the genre. One of them is Charlie Human, the author of Apocalypse Now Now (2013) and Kill Baxter (2014). Our article analyses Human’s two novels in terms of overlapping mythological and historical lineages as well as spatial confluences and their influence on the conception and (re-)definition of South African whiteness. Using Sarah Nuttall’s concept of entanglement (a state of being intertwined or engaged with) in connection with Melissa Steyn’s observations of South African whiteness and its idiosyncratic position in relation to other postcolonial countries, we illustrate how Human’s novels (re-)negotiate South African whiteness by endowing it with a distinctly (Southern) African inflection. By way of conclusion, the paper proposes that speculative fiction gives an easier way to envisage possible solutions to the socio-political complexities at play in present South Africa, which are less difficult to swallow than what realist fiction might be (plausibly) able to offer.
Source: Journal of Literary Studies
Authors: Olivier Moreillon, Alan Muller
Institutions: University of Basel, University of KwaZulu-Natal
Language: English
Subfield: Philosophy
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $388
OpenAlex ID: W2531662067