Lauren Beukes’s Post-Apartheid Dystopia

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Lauren Beukess post-apartheiddystopia: inhabiting MoxylandLouise Bethlehemaa Hebrew University of JerusalemPublished online: 02 Jul 2013.

To cite this article: Louise Bethlehem (2014) Lauren Beukess post-apartheid dystopia: inhabitingMoxyland, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 50:5, 522-534, DOI: 10.1080/17449855.2013.813867

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17449855.2013.813867

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Lauren Beukess post-apartheid dystopia: inhabiting Moxyland

Louise Bethlehem*

Hebrew University of Jerusalem

This article reads South African science-ction writer Lauren Beukess rst novel,Moxyland (2008), set in a futuristic Cape Town, from the perspective of LindsayBremners notion of citiness, asking how cities produce the modernity of the sub-jects who inhabit them. The novel is remarkable for its dependence on the socialgeography of the South African city. The article charts Beukess resolutely mobilecharacters as they negotiate the spatial itineraries and technologies of governance inwhich they are embedded. It explores how Beukess futuristic urban setting fusespunitive forms of digital technology with the biopolitical regulation of socialrelations in an unsettling reprise of the apartheid groundplan. The analysis relatesMoxyland to discussions of African city textualities a critical rubric introduced byRanka Primorac in this journal to signal the interplay of urban and textual networksin constituting the African city.

Keywords: Lauren Beukes; post-apartheid literature; biopolitics; HIV/AIDS;dystopian ction; science ction

South African city textualities

Lauren Beukess rst novel Moxyland (2008) rapidly established her as a South Africanscience-ction writer with an international readership a status conrmed when hersubsequent book Zoo City (2010a) won the prestigious Arthur C. Clarke Award forscience ction. A third novel set in Chicago, The Shining Girls, was released in April2013. For all Beukess global reach, however, her rst two novels are uncompromis-ingly local. Each is remarkable for the extent to which the narrative depends on thesocial geography of the South African cities she depicts whether the Cape Town ofthe dystopian Moxyland, or the Johannesburg of the gritty roman noir, Zoo City. Theurban landscapes represented in each work are deeply stratied, their social divisionspoliced by means of the futuristic mobile-telephone and digital-culture technologies ofMoxyland, or vividly bounded by the animal familiars who literally sit astridecriminalized populations in Zoo City. The authors heightening of performances ofbeing-in-the-city, through the gures of the pedestrian, the commuter, the photographer,the activist, the security guard, the migrant worker, the refugee, the addict and theprostitute, among others, is a hallmark of her poetics. Marginal gures, recognizableincarnations of contemporary refugees, street children and the urban poor inhabit thedetritus of cities which resolutely segregate them.

Emergent criticism of Lauren Beukess ction in South Africa has begun to treat thedistinctiveness of Beukess poetics in terms of its relation to the genres of global sciencection. Cheryl Stobie has examined Moxyland and Zoo City from the perspective of the

*Email: [email protected]

Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 2014Vol. 50, No. 5, 522534, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17449855.2013.813867

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critical dystopian novel, cyberpunk and slipstream (2012), while a recent review ofBeukess latest novel, The Shining Girls (2013), has directed attention to the categoriesof speculative ction or social science ction (Jamal 2013). Both Moxyland and ZooCity show thematic afnities with the genre to come that Evan Calder Williams hastermed salvagepunk on the basis of an analysis of British and North American popularculture (2010, 31). Salvagepunk, Williams tells us, is animated by a radical principle ofrecuperation and construction, a certain relation to how we think those dregs of historywe inherit against our will (2010, 31). His larger theoretical project, set forth inCombined and Uneven Apocalypse: Luciferian Marxism (2010), illuminates yet anotherdimension of Beukess writing: its apocalyptic dimensions.

Williams differentiates between apocalypse on the one hand, and crisis orcatastrophe on the other. Unlike crisis, which he sees as properly cyclical in nature,or catastrophe, which he denes as end without revelation (2010, 4), Williamsinvests apocalypse with a secular redemptive force as an end with revelation, alifting of the veil (5). In his account, the apocalypse ruptures the structure of thegiven order, precipitating the ceaseless struggle to dismantle and repurpose, to witnessthe uncanny persistence of old modes of life, and to redraw the maps and battle lines ofthe sites we occupy (9). Williamss project pivots on the understanding that the worldis already apocalyptic and that there is no event to wait for, just zones in which [ ]revelations are forestalled and [ ] sites where we can take a stand (1112).Williamss replacement of apocalypse as temporal event with apocalypse as spatialorganization (9) in relation to his corpus of popular cultural forms is particularly sug-gestive for the analysis of Lauren Beukess ction. Her futuristic depiction of urbanSouth African landscapes intuits what is radical in this salvaging of images of apoca-lypse; this version of apocalypse-as-salvage. My reading of Moxyland seeks to prolongthe spatial turn associated with Williamss repurposing of apocalypse, but does so inthe interest of addressing the local overdeterminations of Beukess post-apartheid novel.

In literary studies of late, contemporary African literary texts have served to hostvarious interrogations of the spatiality of the African city. My reading of Beukesunfolds in dialogue with some of the major thematic strands that attach to the explora-tion of African city textualities as the latter rubric has emerged from a special issueof this journal, guest edited by Ranka Primorac (2008b). Moxyland explicitly interro-gates urban social transformation; exchanges between the city and textual networks; thecity as a locus of violence; and the orientation of the city text toward the future allissues that Primorac (2008a, 2) singles out as constitutive. Through revisiting such con-cerns, I want to foreground what urban theorist Lindsay Bremner (2010) terms citi-ness, or the means whereby cities produce the modernity of the subjects who inhabitthem. For Bremner, the category is framed by its performativity. Citiness is not a prop-erty of cities, she states, but rather something that they do, something that occursrelationally between a city as a physical, spatial and social entity (topography, climate,buildings, thoroughfares, history, modes and relations of production) and daily life(2010, 42). In the discussion that follows, I will interrogate the manner in which theprotagonists negotiations of citiness both intersect and counter the biopoliticalregulation of space in Moxyland.

City archives: phenomenological and intertextual

Moxyland satirizes what Beukes has termed a corporate apartheid state (2010b, n.p.):a regime that maintains rigid social divisions on the basis of class rather than race.

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Privilege here depends on belonging within the corporate milieu. The plot weavestogether the lives of four young urban protagonists in a restless and relentlessly volatileset of intersections whose intricacy I cannot reect in full. Kendra, Toby, Tendeka andLerato alternate as the rst-person focalizers of the narrative. Kendra, an aspirant artist,illicitly uses analogue cameras to capture Cape Town on spools of old lm. Yet for allher melancholic idealism, she has been co-opted by the corporation and is injected withimmune-enhancing nanotechnology that literally brands her as the ambassador of theGhost soft beverage to which she becomes addicted (Beukes 2008, 13). Toby, young,white, bored and disaffected, stands in cynical counterpart to Kendra, whom hebefriends. He is a neur for the digital age, his interiority a mere reex of the screenthat he wears. The smartfabric of his BabyStrange chamo coat broadcasts imagesbut also records them for his video blog (13). Driven by a mixture of ennui and self-promotion, Toby collaborates with Tendeka, a black homosexual anti-corporation activ-ist, in orchestrating violent acts of symbolic resistance to the corporation in the name ofthe disenfranchised. Tendeka is a Struggle revivalist in Tobys dismissive judgment(11), a Mr Steve Biko-wannabe (13). His violent disruptions of the corporate orderwill be facilitated through the complicity of Tobys friend, Lerato, a former Aidsbaby(107) who has succeeded in climbing the corporate ladder. These acts of subversioninclude scaling a corporation billboard in order to hack into its content (7275), theliteral hacking to pieces of a genetically modied art installation with all-too-realpangas (135137) and the instigation of a ashmob pass-protest demonstration (141,156174) whose consequences reveal Tendeka to have been manipulated, unknowingly,by the very corporation he has sought to oppose.

Despite their differences, Beukess protagonists all inhabit the achieved urbanity ofthe post-apartheid metropolis. In this respect, they strongly resemble their young real-world counterparts depicted by Sarah Nuttall as they stage what she terms the right tobe urban in the present (2008, 92) a right historically denied to black South Africansunder apartheid. Consequently, citiness might in itself be said to stand here as onemarker of the so-called post-transitional South African text (Frenkel and McKenzie2010). The novel cannily circulates within, rather than merely depicts, the ows ofconsumption, transaction and exchange that the city offers. Its pointed emplacement incontemporary youth culture shows afnities with other satirical performances in SouthAfrica, ranging from Conrad Botes and Anton Kannemeyers Bitterkomix of the early1990s to the provocations of the contemporary counter-cultural band, Die Antwoord.Yet for all its purchase over what Achille Mbembe and Sarah Nuttall term the now(Mbembe 2008; Nuttall 2008), Beukess novel perpetuates elements of a much olderpopular cultural form, the melodrama, which itself maintains robust ties with urbansettings and their representation.

In The Melodramatic Imagination, rst published in 1976, Peter Brooks traces theemergence of the melodrama in 18th-century French theatre before turning to some of itslater literary incarnations. Brooks isolates the melodramatic mode which exists as apopular literary substrate within the literary canon, showing how the melodrama takes ona particularly urban cast in the work of Honor de Balzac. For Balzac, Brooks argues,

The world is subsumed by an underlying manichaeism, and the narrative creates the excite-ment of its drama by putting us in touch with the conict of good and evil played outunder the surface of things just as description of the surfaces of the modern metropolispierces through to a mythological realm where the imagination can nd a habitat for itsplay with large moral entities. (1995, 45)

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Pressure exerted on the textual surface seeks to unveil the moral occult in the termsBrooks suggests that is to say, a repository of values which is both fragmentary anddesacralized (5). The terms of this analysis usefully allow us to position Beukes asworking within the broad ethical manichaeism of melodrama. While her villains areoften the stuff of a knowingly ludic pastiche, she nevertheless takes villainy very seri-ously as do her protagonists, anti-heroes one and all. But if, in Brookss account, therealist or naturalist text exerts pressure on the city as setting to provide a saturationof meaning that serves the binary ethical conict of the melodramatic mode, Beukessurban(e) reprise of the melodramatic imaginary has something different to teach us.Here, the naturalist text does not so much exert pressure on the city, as in Brookssaccount of melodrama. Rather, Moxyland allows us to explore the manner in which theSouth African city exerts pressure on the narrative, despite the attenuated realism of thisdystopian novel.

This is in the rst instance a matter of the hospitality that Beukess rst two novelsdisplay towards the cities we know her to inhabit, or to have inhabited. Beukes, residentin Cape Town, has also lived in Johannesburg. She sets the itineraries, ows and block-ages of these two South African cities to work in her ction. She is able to do sothrough recourse to an extra-textual archive: one that is autobiographical in a narrowsense, and phenomenological in a wider circuit. Beukes is an actor in the settings shedescribes. A lived knowledge of their workings deposits a certain epistemology of theSouth African city between the lines of her ction. Beukes knows the city outside thetext the way we all know cities through the proximity of body-to-body in motionthrough space, a constant if tacit and always provisional calculus of engagement (seeSimone 2006, 74; Bridge 2005, 7376).

Beukes does not shrug off knowledge of these phenomenological traces of her rela-tions with the city when she sits down to write. On the contrary, certain lived archivesof the city survive the non-mimetic deformations of other deictic coordinates of the rep-resented world, whether in Moxyland or Zoo City. Beukess thematization of the city as a central device of her poetics exists in a continuum with her own digressions atstreet level, her walking in the city in Michel de Certeaus (1984, 91110) familiaruse of this term. In the interview that concludes the Jacana edition of Zoo City, Beukesspeaks of her journalism as granting a

pass out of my middle-class comfort zone and into the most interesting part of the city,from the Koeberg nuclear power plant to six-star boutique hotels that play host to popstarsand politicos to taking a stroll with electricity cable thieves through the townships. (2010b,n.p.)

Specically, Beukess rendering of her peripatetic urban characters in Moxyland seemsto operate in terms of the tactical logic which Michel de Certeau ascribes to city-dwellersin general. Kendra, Toby, Tendeka and Lerato are resolutely mobile focalizers in thiswork. As the characters improvise pedestrian enunciation[s], employing Nuttalls reso-nant phrase (2009, 40), in order to evade a repressive spatial hegemony policed by digi-tal technologies, they recurrently turn their attention to aspects of a city that is nevermerely the passive backdrop against which their stories unfold. The relations of proxythat exist between Beukes and her characters do not have to be fully extrapolated ortotalized in order to see her as providing us with an oblique phenomenology of the city.

The archives that inform Moxyland are, however, as much textual as they arephenomenological. This is a necessary consequence of its status as a novel. So it is


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simultaneously necessary to claim that the city understood as a specically textualconstruct this time also shapes Beukess narrative. The literary and cultural constructswhich have accreted around the South African city can themselves be said to achieveintertextual density at certain junctures leading to the emergence of literary topoi thatsediment and disclose the past of the city. This intertextuality is not a matter of borrow-ing, or of direct allusion, so much as the reworking of discursive constructs that circu-late within a larger cultural imaginary. An analysis of Moxyland keyed towards citytextualities might thus protably begin by noting how it refuses the dialectic of surfaceand depth that has dominated literary as well as sociological or historiographic constructs of the South African city. This dialectic has been dominant, I would suggest,precisely because writing on South African cities has been so preoccupied with Johan-nesburg, whose geology as well as social history makes it an exemplary site for suchspeculations. In their important co-edited volume Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropo-lis, Achille Mbembe and Sarah Nuttall hold that the dialectic between the under-ground, the surface and the edges is, more than any other feature, the maincharacteristic of the African modern of which Johannesburg is the epitome (2008, 17).Beukes is not indifferent to this choreography of surface and depth, which arguablystands at the very core of her second novel, set in Johannesburg (see Bethlehem 2011).In Moxyland, however, the hermeneutics of depth are refused in the interests of repeatedinterrogations of surface economies and ows.

Surface economies

I am a crumpling faade. (Beukes 2008, 223)

The second paragraph of Moxyland depicts the segregated corporate line, the underwaythat serves the city of Cape Town. The exposition defamiliarizes the known urban set-ting: its mimesis is explicitly ctive and futuristic. The simile is prelude to a second sim-ile that allows us to identify Kendra as the source of the paratactic interior monologue ofthe rst paragraph: Like me. Art school dropout reinvented as shiny brand ambassador.Sponsor baby. Ghost girl (Beukes 2008, 1). The phrase ghost girl uses a conventionaldenotation to evoke the fantastic. But it is immediately literalized as Beukes wrenches itinto a new context to refer to Kendras transformation into a brand ambassador. TheGhost logo will be written in her esh, although to the extent that the verb carries histor-ical meanings including to score, incise, carve, engrave with a sharp instrument (seeMarsh 1998, 261), it is misleading. The commercial sign will not so much be inscribedon an antecedent surface, as thicken the legibility of that surface. None of the signaturegoosebumps of an LED implant blinking through the ink of a conventional light tattoo,Toby will observe of Kendras logo. Cos this isnt sub-dermal. This is her skin (Beu-kes 2008, 15). Throughout the novel, the observing gaze will alight on surfaces whichdo not conceal an occulted interiority just out of reach, as it were. Here as elsewhere,Moxyland will persistently defer the gratication of the depth charge.

The protagonists of the novel align themselves phenomenologically with thecompulsion of surfaces. Toby is particularly instructive here. A gamer, he wrenches thecategory of skin out of its South African overdeterminations and into the lexicon ofdigital culture. His coat hints at this retooling. Its smartfabric transmits images(close-ups of especially revolting fungal skin infections, 18-century dissection dia-grams and, for a taste of local avor, a row of smileys [11]), 1 but also harvests themfor his video blog (My streamcast is called the Diary of Cunt [ ]. Your weekly

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round-up of Tobys astounding life: good drugs, good music, sexploits withexceptionally beautiful girls, regular skirmishes with the motherbitch, and, mostrecently, some para-criminal counter-culture activities [13]). Tobys prosthetic sheathreplays the surface-to-surface economies of urban space in the novel. It is a variant onthe billboards that serve the informational relays of the city, and that will serve as sitesof resistance on the part of the disenfranchised as the plot unfolds. The Cape Town ofMoxyland is a skein of intersecting planes, ows, circuits and skins: organic andmanufactured, digital and analogue, visible and invisible. It welds sovereignty andspatiality to technologies of governance.

Technologies of governance

One of the most compelling aspects of Moxyland lies precisely in its imagining of thetriangulation between sovereignty, spatiality and technology.2 Beukes has transposed theracial stratications of apartheid into an economic register; as many argue that the neo-liberal post-apartheid state has done. The dispossessed the urban poor who inhabitslums reminiscent of apartheid townships, or the inhabitants of the Rurals, segregatedand AIDS-ridden still seek access to the city in Beukess deliberate evocation of thespatial injustice that was apartheid. The struggle over the right to the city, never artic-ulated in these terms but congruent with Henri Lefebvres (1996, 147159) intervention,forms an important dimension of the novel.

The cellular telephone has a special part to play in this regime. It is the mobilephone which regulates inclusion within the body politic in Moxyland, enabling bothsocial and economic liquidity. Thus disconnection is tantamount to social death: Youcant play nice by societys rules? Then you dont get to play at all. No phone. Noservice. No life (Beukes 2008, 17). The cellular telephone service is allied to whatFoucault (1979) might term disciplinary power. But it also allows the corporate sover-eign to impose corporal punishment of a distinctly penal order, administering electriccurrent to defuse offenders. Its like shock therapy, you know, Tendeka says,dampening down excitable behaviour, frying our brains, attening us out, so were allunquestioning, unresisting obedient model fucking zombie puppydog citizens (Beukes2008, 27). From the vantage point of critical geography, we might stress how themobile phone affords or blocks access to discontinuous enclaves the latter producedas a precise consequence of the social relations of inclusion and exclusion that thephone itself polices, whether these are ethnic, class or gender relations. It is all to thepoint to emphasize that the technology does not oat above material divides imaginedas being embedded in pre-existing spatial congurations because space, as Henri Lefeb-vre (1978, 1991) rst argued in the 1970s, is itself always constituted within networksof social relations. Rather, the technology facilitates a certain conguration of socialrelations that produces the highly repressive spatial order. Thus Tendekas and fel-low activist Ashrafs tortuous passage through the streets of Cape Town (Beukes 2008,2529), following the brutal defuse-disconnect imposed on Tendeka that has markedhim as spatially disenfranchised, affords a lay critique of spatial regulation. The worstis conrmed, observes Tendeka,

when we get to the entrance to the D-line underway stop on Wale Street and my phonewont scan. Or, rather, it does scan and blocks me outright in response to the police tag onmy SIM, to the tremendous amusement of the leisure-class kids overdressed in their uglyexpensive clothes. (25)


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To the extent that we attend to the protagonists own negotiations of the spatialitineraries in which they are embedded, our reading of the novel facilitates theemergence of a contingent critical pedagogy of space that can be articulated alongsidemore traditionally literary critical concerns.

That repressive spatial orders require technologies of governance heightens Beukessrelevance for this type of pedagogy. It is all too possible to enumerate an extra-textualinventory of technologies allied to iconic instances of the biopolitical degradation ofspace, such as the concentration camp (Agamben 1998); the plantation (Mbembe 2003);the mining compound (Mbembe 2008); the enclaved locales of the Occupied Territories(Azoulay 2012; Hana 2006; Mbembe 2003; Ophir, Givoni, and Hana 2009;Weizmann 2007). These technologies might include, but are surely not limited to, thefence (Hofmeyr 1993); barbed wire (Razac 2000); the yellow star (A. Goldberg 2006);the camera (Azoulay 2012); the checkpoint (Mansbach 2009); the separation wall (D. T.Goldberg 2010). In the specic context under discussion, the examination of the use ofthe mobile phone in Moxyland facilitates awareness of the essentially political degrada-tion of space that ensues from its deployment. The armed cellular telephone not onlyattacks the unruly subject who, like a latter-day avatar of apartheids disqualied per-son or abjected non-white body, stalks the grid of spatial disenfranchisement, as Lind-say Bremner (2010, 167) so eloquently explores. Rather, this technology also corrodeswhat dissident Israeli intellectual Ariella Azoulay terms the fundamental principle ofshared public space that is to say, the fact of its being open to passage, free of vio-lence, and shared by all in accordance with regulated consensus (2012, 151). Azoulaywrites in response to the political deformation of Palestinian space under the IsraeliOccupation. In her recent book, Civil Imagination: A Political Ontology of Photogra-phy, she shows how the Israeli sovereign in the Occupied Territories pursues the man-date of a perverted fait du prince, reworking the privilege of intervention for publicgood in the built environment in order to create a deformed spatial regime under thesway of an architecture of destruction (143156). Adopting Azoulays insights for thepurposes of this discussion, we might position the sovereign who is ethno-nationalistin the Palestinian context, and corporate within the parameters of Beukess novel asan architect who intervenes in shared space to block the circulation of disqualiedsubjects, to recall the apartheid lexicon. The deformed spatial regime of Beukess dysto-pia reminds us that the architecture of destruction may well deploy components that donot belong within the order of built form. South Africas white-supremacist PrimeMinister D. F. Malan, who was in ofce when the apartheid regime imposed its versionof the pass laws, knew this well. The passbook was never extraneous to the degradationof space in apartheid South Africa.

As a kind of digital passbook, the armed cellular phone renders infringement andretribution simultaneous. It closes the innitesimal gap that the passbook left openbetween the policeman and the black South African subject, or between the apartheidstates interpellation of the racialized body, on the one hand, and incarceration or theextraction of labour which followed as the consequence of pass offences, on theother. That the passbook ghostwrites Beukess representations of a segregated corpo-rate-apartheid state is no coincidence. Moxyland draws much of its humour and someof its frisson from the friction it maintains with the apartheid past. Mr Muller, the age-ing photojournalist whom Kendra seeks out for his analogue photographic talents, livesin District Six (Beukes 2008, 59) one of many areas in the novel named for theirapartheid-era associations. The very plot of Moxyland playfully restages the novel ofresistance whose rhetoric of urgency constituted the dominant of apartheid-era

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literature (see Bethlehem 2001). But Beukes obeys neither the hermeneutics of depthimplied by this topos, nor its valorization of canonical literary forms. In fact, her treat-ment of resistance is better seen as congruent with the strategies of the comic book.

In a suggestive reading of superhero comics, Phillip Thurtle and Robert Mitchellsuggest that the comic book is able to explore the consequences of anomalous eventsbefore they pierce the horizons of social awareness (2007, 269-270). More particularly,they claim, comic books explore the anomalies that emerge from the very real differ-ences in the scales of an industrialized society on the one hand, and the scales ofembodied experience on the other (270). According to Thurtle and Mitchell, it is inthe depiction of disaster, in particular, that comic books are able to foreground a logicof anomaly (269) denaturalizing the packaging of ows that underpin industrializedsociety (281285). In Moxyland, Tendeka operates precisely in accordance with thelogic of the comic book or, equally, the computer game. He and his fellow activistsscale a billboard in order to hack into its content, in a sequence that repeatedly fore-grounds their embodied vulnerability (Beukes 2008, 7275). Like his operator, a charac-ter known only as skyward, Tendeka is attuned to the subversion attendant ondisrupting the ows of information that constitute the postmodern city: the city is acommunication system, exhorts skyward, were going to teach it a new language(97, lower-case in original). Tendekas eventual bombing of the city makes disaster ofdisruption, suspending the packaging of the city and its services, Thurtle and Mitchellmight claim, to lay bare the industrial-sized mediations (2007, 295) that ordinarilymake the city habitable.

As we have already noted, Tendekas opposition will prove to have been manipu-lated by the corporation itself. His instigation of civil protest has disastrous conse-quences. In a manner reminiscent of the purple rain tactics of the South Africansecurity forces under apartheid, protesters and would-be gamers drawn into the fracas atthe Adderley Street underway (a location named for its real-world counterpart) aresprayed with the M7N1 Marburg virus.3 They must report to police vaccination centresor face death. Tendeka will succumb to the virus, but not before attempting to create aspectacle of his martyrdom. He enlists the cameras on Tobys coat and the assistance ofLerato, the corporate programmer sympathetic to the cause:

Can your friend hook us up? Lerato?

To what?

Remote link-up. So we can transmit your coats cameras to the billboards? The city isgoing to bear witness. (Beukes 2008, 217)

The metonymic connection created here preserves Beukess tacit understanding that theagency of her urban protagonists is indivisible from the material channels as well as themodes of apperception afforded by the city.

Ghostly futures

Beukes is too canny a writer to allow the spectacle of resistance to be fully consum-mated in what remains, after all, a dystopian novel. Lerato is turned by the corpora-tion which, we learn, has instigated the insurrection in the rst place to achieve a kindof surrogate catharsis (Beukes 2008, 230). Toby does not, in fact, broadcast Tendekas


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suffering (226). The activist dies gruesomely in his company (234235). Kendra, whosenanotech implant has enabled her to recover from the Marburg virus, is eliminated byher Ghost sponsors. But not before she has had sex with Toby, who survives in posses-sion of exclusive footage on the untimely and grotesque death of a terrorist. / Or amartyr. Depends on whos paying (236). As the novel draws to a close, the surfaceeconomies it projects increasingly pivot on forms of viral replication and, indeed, ofcontagion that are far from merely digital.

It is, in fact, primarily through its deployment of contagion that Moxyland unveilsthe biopolitical dimensions of the hyper-vigilant spatial regime that it depicts. Foucault(1978) argues that biopower consists in the hold that power maintains over the right tosustain life and to administer death at the level of populations. He introduces thistheme in the last section of The History of Sexuality, volume 1, where he writes: Onemight say that the ancient right to take life or let live was replaced by a power to fosterlife or disallow it to the point of death (138). Foucaults later oeuvre (2003, 239263)makes explicit the degree to which biopower mobilizes categories of race in order toexert discriminations which are, in the most profound sense, always a matter of life anddeath. Racism intervenes where biopower exercises the right to deny life. Thus, for thelater Foucault, racism is primarily a way of introducing a break into the domain of lifethat is under powers control: the break between what lives and what must die (254).

At rst sight, Moxyland seems to bypass the racial determinism of the apartheid era,to the extent that its allegory of corporate apartheid targets the neo-liberalism thatThabo Mbekis regime entrenched in the newly democratic South African state(Gumede 2007, 91). But the plot-line associated with Lerato, the bearer of neo-liberalvalues in the text, enables us to revisit the biopolitical overdetermination that is theresidual tint/taunt of apartheid in this novel. Lerato travels to work in Gabarone with aminor chest infection (Beukes 2008, 35). This inevitably makes her the object of bio-political surveillance when she attempts to return home: Its no surprise when Customspulls me aside at OR Tambo international, ready to slam me into quarantine with therest of the medical refugees in the camps converted from hangars (36). This sequencereveals the HIV virus to regulate the spatial regime establish by the Corporation:When the uniform at the counter asks me for my immune status, Lerato reports, Isnap I think youll nd my company does regular, Health-Dept approved screenings,and slap down my Communique exec ID, which has the intended effect (37). Biopoli-tics emerges when Lerato coughs. Or when she prepares to write advertising copy([Your baby] really needs all this goodness in a way thats palatable to her still-devel-oping immune system, that she can readily absorb, especially when it comes to HIVantibodies [78, italics in original]). The regulatory force of biopolitics comes intoplay, I would argue, precisely under the sign of the longue dure of apartheid itself.

Moxyland invites us to engage in historical recursion to the extent that Leratosbackstory is that of the HIV/AIDS virus. Lerato, Aidsbaby-made-good, has foughther way out of the orphanage operated by the apartheid-era parastatal electricity utility,Eskom, which the novel bitingly terms her parent company (Beukes 2008, 108). Sherecurrently chafes at her siblings attempts to memorialize her dead parents. We triedto do a pilgrimage a few years ago [ ]. But two days before we were set to leave,the govt [sic] announced a new round of quarantines, which made travelling into theCiskei impossible (106). The expository subplot associated with Lerato introduceshistorical continuity into the temporal rupture created by the futurism of this allegory.This has everything to do with the invocation of the apartheid-era Bantustan known asthe Ciskei, and similar so-called homelands.

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In a riveting account of the biopolitical rationality of HIV/AIDS denialism, AdamSitze (2004) has charted a history of the virus in South Africa. He cites a variety ofsources to suggest that the apartheid government, at the brink of political transition,deliberately failed to prevent the spread of AIDS in the homelands in order to decimateblack populations (2004, 789790). But Sitze acutely points out that the weaponiza-tion of people with HIV/AIDS is properly an extension of the sovereign power to letdie which he recognizes as always integral to the necropolitics of the apartheid state(790; see Mbembe 2003 for necropolitics). The essentially necropolitical function ofthe Bantustans, as spatial loci of the sovereign power to let die, was not suspended,Sitze argues here and elsewhere, by the transition to democracy in South Africa (seealso Sitze 2003, 3637, 4777). Sitzes analysis is corroborated by Jonny Steinbergs(2008) important exploration of the effects of the virus on one South African man, resi-dent in the remote Eastern Cape village that Steinberg names Ithanga. Meditations onthe politics and apperception of space including considerations such as the distance ofpatients in remote former homelands from medical clinics, access to informal providersof care, or differences in rural and urban phenomenologies run persistently throughSteinbergs analysis. The radical coincidence of spatial disenfranchisement and compro-mised immunity in the novel, of course, but more urgently in the society from whichthe novel has emerged is a measure of how persistently the two have been linked inthe recent history of South Africa.4

Is it surprising that Moxyland is saturated with the ghostly traces of South Africastrafc in bodies? Probably not. Here I join Sarah Nuttall, who cautions us not to expectthe apartheid symptom to disappear whether from cultural practice (art in Nuttallsanalysis, popular literature in mine) or from our critical hermeneutics (Nuttall 2009,106). So our task now becomes a matter of charting the specic itineraries of ourghosts. Or better still, of charting their futures. Lauren Beukess character Toby enablesus to do just this. That Toby has survived the Marburg virus is not accidental. Hisimmunity is sexually transmitted. It is Kendras parting gift; her addictive Ghostly nano-technological bequest. This denouement should not be underestimated. At a stroke,Beukes effectively repudiates powerful narratives of degeneration that extend betweenthe miscegenatory anxieties of pre-apartheid and apartheid-era writing in South Africaand the taint of blood that haunts the post-apartheid literary archive.5 As Toby takes tothe streets again in the nal lines of the novel, he opens the experience of selfhood inthe city to a viral resistance whose subversion of the biopolitical capture of spaceshould not be dismissed. Nor should it be overestimated. The character has been sparedin the interests of salvage, we might insist, following Evan Williams, rather than salva-tion. The end has come and gone. There is, to echo Williams, no event to wait for. Istep out of the door into a whole new bright world, feeling exhausted and exhilarated,Toby records in the penultimate line of the novel (Beukes 2008, 236). And thirsty, headds, as Beukes appends a wry commentary on his failure to evade completely theoverdeterminations of the past. In this telling oscillation, Beukes has Toby esh out theapocalyptic strain of the contemporary moment. The characters errance, Paul de Man(1986, 91) might have us say, his walking in the grooves of Beukess language,congures the post-apartheid dystopia as the haunt of a redemptive contagion.

AcknowledgmentsThis paper was presented in a different form at the African Cities Conference, the African Centrefor Cities, University of Cape Town, 79 September 2011, as well as at the Department of


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English, the University of Stellenbosch, 10 April 2013. My thanks go to Edgar Pieterse, JenniferRobinson, Louise Green and Megan Jones for their generous responses in these various settings. Ihad the opportunity to present my work on Beukes as a visiting scholar at the Wits Institute forSocial and Economic Research in April 2013. Thanks are due to Sarah Nuttall for this invitationand to all my interlocutors in the WISER colloquium for a riveting conversation. Brian McHaleand the anonymous reviewers of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing made incisive contributionsto this paper. I appreciate their suggestions. Lastly, I want to acknowledge the Harry S. TrumanInstitute for the Advancement of Peace at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem for supporting thisresearch project.

Notes1. In contemporary South Africa, smileys refer to sheeps heads, which are often roasted by

pavement vendors and consumed in informal pavement settings.2. My choice of the term sovereignty to denote hegemonic authority over territory invokes it

as a synecdoche for a certain manner of thinking about governance in political philosophy.More specically, my recourse to sovereignty relies on Giorgio Agambens spatialization ofthe state of exception in his identication of the camp as the nomos of the modern (1998,166).

3. For a commemoration of the 2 September 1989 protest, where purple dye was used to markprotesters for later identication and arrest, see http://heritage.thetimes.co.za/memorials/WC/ThePurpleShallGovern/.

4. The literature on HIV/AIDS in South Africa is enormous. See also, inter alia, Posel (2005),Cameron (2005) and Fassin (2007). For an account of the suffering body of the AIDS patientand the city in particular, see Le Marcis (2008). Neville Hoads (2004) reading of PhaswaneMpes Welcome to Our Hillbrow offers an important analysis of contagion, bodily uids,AIDS and mourning in urban South Africa.

5. The paradigmatic, notoriously racist, exploration of contagion through so-called miscegena-tion is Sarah Gertrude Millins Gods Step-Children (1951), rst published in 1924.

Notes on contributor

Louise Bethlehem is Senior Lecturer in the English Department and the Program inCultural Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her book Skin Tight: ApartheidLiterary Culture and its Aftermath (2006) was published in Hebrew translation by thedissident Tel Aviv publishing house, Resling, in 2011. She has co-edited six volumes inAfrican Studies, South African Literary Studies, Postcolonial Theory and CulturalStudies.

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Documents

Lauren Beukes’s Post-Apartheid Dystopia