Joining the Dots: Environment, Disease and Enterprise in the “New” South African Novel

Abstract

The chapter discusses how Get a Life and High Low In - Between narrativise a failure to imagine the connections and its corrective of joining the dots between global capitalism, the environment and human health. This corrective is revealed through a process of telescoping divergent scales of existence, from the microscopic to the cosmic, that has been deployed by environmentalists and ecocritics to understand the relationship between human and planetary agency. Joining the dots prompts readings of human disease such as HIV/AIDS, in part at least, as an issue of environmental injustice. This thesis risks apparently endorsing Thabo Mbeki’s eccentric response to the AIDS crisis, whereby Mbeki argued with catastrophic effect that poverty causes AIDS. Yet notions of environmental justice provide a meaningful, materialist intervention in our understanding of human health.