Crime Fiction, South Africa: A Critical Introduction

Noir Affect in Lauren Beukes’s Zoo City

“…If the emotion of empathy is, as Sara Ahmed shows, a form of orienting oneself towards the other within networks of subject-object sociality, 17 Zinzi realises that nourishing the emotional connections of such human-animal collectives is a way not just to avoid self-annihilation in the apocalyptic rift known as the Undertow or "shadow-self absorption," 18 but to function within an "ethical framework" in which "Aposymbiot interaction" can model interhuman relations. 19 Drawing on South African crime fiction's commitment to investigating questions of social and political inequity, 20 this "noirish slum tale filled with African magic" 21 weighs the ethics of relationality from the viewpoint of a marginalised individual who laterally experiences the burden of guilt and shame for the past, as well as the "cruel optimism," in Lauren Berlant's words, of pursuing the ideal of building the nation on empathetic foundations in a fraying twenty-first century "affective environment" in which precarious "bodies and lives are saturated by capitalist forces and rhythms." 22 This is also indicated by Beukes's Borgesian-style reflections 23 on the potential of her noir form to become a template for the production of an affective imagination premised on the ethics of empathy, as suggested in the statement that is used as a motto to this study: "You try to transmute the emotion into a story that will make other people care."…”

Making and Unmaking ‘African Foreignness’: African Settings, African Migrants and the Migrant Detective in Contemporary South African Crime Fiction

“…Naidu disagrees with their reading of Payback, and South African crime writing on the whole, as 'a genre which lacks ideological commitment and which abandons history and politics in favour of generic conventions that offer the reader escapism and consolation'. 51 Naidu's critique seems warranted, particularly in the light of the unconventional ending of the last part of the trilogy, which, admittedly, was published after Titlestad and Polatinsky's article. Even though Black Heart ends with a cautious step towards a rebonding between Mace and his estranged daughter, the final scene adds to the almost complete loss of everything meaningful in Mace's life the breakdown of his beloved red Alfa Romeo Spider.…”

Enmeshment of Zimbabwean law and literature in Petina Gappah’s Rotten Row (2016)

“…These sentiments touch on the lack of artistic merit and inherent sensationalisation of the genre especially regarding the courtroom scenes. Critics are also wary of fields that are meant to produce high volumes and be easily read (Naidu, 2013). The field is generally regarded as being lowbrow literature.…”