Animals and Desire in South African Fiction

Biopolitics and the Resistance to Colonization

Jason D. Price

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9783319567259
• eBook ISBN: 9783319567266
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire africaine

This book considers the political potential of affective experiences of desire as reflected in contemporary South African literature. Jason Price argues that definitions of desire deployed by capitalist and colonial culture maintain social inequality by managing relations to ensure a steady flow of capital and pleasure for the dominant classes, whereas affective encounters with animals reveal the nonhuman nature of desire, a biopower that, in its unpredictability, can frustrate regimes of management and control. Price wonders how animals' different desires might enable new modes of thought to positively transform and resist the status quo. This book contends that South African literary works employ nonhuman desire and certain indigenous notions of desire to imagine a South Africa that can be markedly different from the past.

Table of contents

• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Chapter 1 Introduction: Sameness and Difference in the “New” South Africa—Desire and Nonhuman Resistance
• Chapter 2 Space and Desire on the (non)Farm: The Return of the Same in Disgrace and
• Chapter 3 Ways of Desiring: Postcolonial Animals and Affect in The Whale Caller
• Chapter 4 Consuming the Other and the Ethics of “Eating”: Dominant Desire in Tanuki Ichiban and the Mother of All Eating
• Chapter 5 Desire and the Law: Creative Resistance in the Reluctant Passenger and the Heart of Redness
• Chapter 6 Coda: Transformative Encounters: Desiring Aliens and Hospitality in District 9
• Index