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Browsing Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences by Subject "'Zombie politics' -- South Africa"

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    Lily Herne’s Deadlands series and the practice of zombie politics in present-day South Africa
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2017-03) Davis, Tatum; Oppelt, Riaan; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Since its initial publication in 2011, the Deadlands series gained an increasing amount of critical attention, owing to its relevance to contemporary South African society. The series demonstrates the relevance of zombies to reading present-day South Africa in local literature. Like most South African literature, Deadlands and other science fiction novels grapple with the memory of Apartheid and how the youth approaches this anxiety. As Sarah Nuttall noted of young South Africans in the first decade of the new millennium, large parts of the South African youth today (now sometimes referred to as “Born Frees” if they were born in or after 1994) understand Apartheid as a history that does not belong to them yet. Ironically, many young people in South Africa incorporate struggle icons into everyday fashion, music and other facets of popular culture as a means of understanding history. Although the struggles faced by the current youth and that of the previous generations are not the same, they are related to one another via the different political conditions that characterised apartheid and post-apartheid circumstances. For the post-apartheid youth the new, democratically elected governments have done little to better the lives of all South Africans, with media and social media portraying a corrupted government that chooses to increase its own wealth rather than the lives of South African citizens. For the French sociologist Jean Baudrillard and Canadian scholar and critic Henry Giroux, this practice – referred to as zombie politics by Giroux— is symptomatic of a modern capitalist society that celebrates social and civil decay and undermines the notion of a healthy democracy. In this worldview, wealth and affluence are linked to political gain and are measured by the number of outward symbols thereof, rather than embracing democratic principles. Furthermore, the practitioners of zombie politics use such symbols in order to manipulate the voting populace. The Deadlands series parodies this process to show that such practices are futile and that the apartheid legacy, specifically with reference to present-day political and economic discourse, is subject to decay over time. While this parody is from the perspective of two white South African women, Death of a Saint parodies the formative narrative of establishing whiteness in South Africa by re-enacting the Great Trek in a future, post-cataclysmic South Africa in which zombies have taken over most of the landscape. The second novel in the series rewrites this narrative in a way that suggests migration and conflict are means toward progress. For the protagonists, the information they discover toward the end of Death of a Saint can be used in order to change the hierarchal structure that exists in the Cape Town enclave but instead, they are captured and enslaved by affluent overlords who profit from the existence of zombies and capitalism that ironically references its own origins in Northern Africa throughout Army of the Lost. The series humorously suggests that South Africa is embroiled in zombie politics, and that citizens are responsible for ensuring peaceful co-existence with the Other embodied by the zombie.