- Title
- White anxieties in the Post-Apartheid speculative dystopian fiction of Eben Venter, Lauren Beukes and Lily Herne
- Creator
- Matroos, Allissa Shanice
- Subject
- Dystopias in literature
- Subject
- Women and literature Fiction -- Women authors
- Date Issued
- 2018
- Date
- 2018
- Type
- Thesis
- Type
- Masters
- Type
- MA
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/10948/22682
- Identifier
- vital:30054
- Description
- This study uncovers and critiques the various ways in which Eben Venter‘s Trencherman (2008), Lauren Beukes‘ Moxyland (2008) and Lily Herne‘s Deadlands (2011) manifest an engagement with socio-political expressions of whiteness within post-apartheid South Africa. These overtly dystopian depictions of a country twenty-two years into its democracy reflect a level of anxiety felt by white South Africans attempting to negotiate the change in their socio-political circumstances. Within the alternate post-apartheid South Africa of Trencherman, whiteness comes to the fore as a socially constructed albatross preventing engagement with the trenchant effects of apartheid, as well as a grotesque bulging mass of unearned privilege embodied by a descendent of an Afrikaans farmer. Moxyland and Deadlands, however, portray a less overt engagement with whiteness by foregoing a critique of prevalent racial inequities. Instead, both authors favour an interrogation of South Africa‘s deleterious class hierarchy in settings that are fantastically futuristic and dystopic. This lends to my argument that the genre of speculative dystopian fiction has been sought out as an ideal space for white South African writers to (safely) deal with white anxieties. It is also pivotal to place these texts alongside one another to examine the ways in which white writers deal with whiteness as a marker of social privilege within the South African socio-political landscape. The theory of whiteness and the theories surrounding dystopian fiction will be used as integral theoretical frameworks for this study.
- Format
- v, 160 leaves
- Format
- Publisher
- Nelson Mandela University
- Publisher
- Faculty of Arts
- Language
- English
- Rights
- Nelson Mandela University
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