Speculating after the Interregnum: Utopia and Apocalypse in Cape Town

Stoddart, James

Speculating after the Interregnum: Utopia and Apocalypse in Cape Town

Thesis / Dissertation

2025

Publisher

University of Cape Town

Department

Department of English Language and Literature

Faculty

Faculty of Humanities

Abstract

In Nadine Gordimer's hugely influential essay “Living in Interregnum”, she places the locus of “revolutionary change” attempting to dismantle the apartheid system–and other aftereffects of nineteenth century colonialism in South Africa– in the city of Johannesburg. Yet as identified by notable scholars such as Pumla Gqola “we are both free and not entirely free of Apartheid”. I undertake an examination of select novels of speculative fiction that showcase the constant, transformative struggle to redress its aftereffects. K. Sello Duiker, Mia Arderne and Alistair Mackay (the subjects of this dissertation), address the legacy of Apartheid spatial planning within the spatial assemblage of the post-Apartheid city. The city of Cape Town, as the primary setting for this dissertation, is examined within the novels of Thirteen Cents, Mermaid Fillet and It Doesn't Have To Be This Way through the usage of tropes such as utopia and apocalypse. I use a few theoretical frameworks that read together explicate the geographies of representation within the novels I examine, from Berlant's “Cruel Optimism” (illustrating an “affective” experience of Cape Town) to Berger's understanding of apocalypse and Jameson's theorisation of Utopia for their explicitly literary interventions. I aim to answer how speculative fiction mediates the city of Cape Town in the transitional moment post-Apartheid. Chapter one introduces the literature and the scope of the debates. Chapter two engages the urban form within speculative fiction by reading Simone's “People as Infrastructure” alongside the novels as framed by “Cruel Optimism”. Chapter three examines utopic representations within Thirteen Cents and It Doesn't Have To Be This Way. Chapter four reads the utility of apocalyptic representations in mediating post-Apartheid Cape Town. Chapter five concludes my thesis. Therefore, this dissertation seeks to understand how the representations of Cape Town function simultaneously an Apartheid and Post-Apartheid city within the novels of Thirteen Cents, Mermaid Fillet and It Doesn't Have To Be This Way. This analysis aims to illustrate how Cape Town came to be a liminal space, a space of contradictions, where representations of apocalypse and utopia can exist side by side.