“For the city yet to come”: South African speculative fiction and futurity at the urban edge

This article reads contemporary South African speculative fictions as portents of the African “city yet to come”. In Masande Ntshanga’s Triangulum , Lauren Beukes’s Moxyland and Zoo City , and Muthi Nhlema’s short story, “Ta O’Reva”, vulnerable informal urban communities are depicted as expendable human resources, subject to industrial pollution and disease, data and body-parts farming, and cloning. Plagues figure literally as human disease but also metaphorically as signs of extractive capitalism. Situating South African speculative fiction within the field of world-literary studies, the article sheds light on the genre’s contribution to the critique of capitalist modernity, thereby challenging any preconceptions of speculative fiction’s inherent conservatism. The article augments world-literary studies with a reflection on the radical potentiality of speculations on communities existing at the sharp end of global capitalism. For, whilst each text depicts a world that is “one, and unequal”, as Franco Moretti conjectures in advocating for distant reading of structural inequality, at the same time, each registers this potentiality at the level of literary form. Through its singular spatio-temporality, speculative fiction opens the imaginative space in which the tension between immiseration and such potentiality can be realized, in what Darko Suvin calls “a mapping of possible alternatives”.