Abstract
As a nation of the global South, with its history of imperialism and apartheid intersecting in
the present moment with neoliberal globalization, South Africa constitutes something of a
‘crucible’ of entangled spatio-temporalities along with manifestations of psycho-social
ruination. Positing that conceptions of time are integral to socio-economic structures within
history, and that colonial temporal frameworks mystify racialized power relations and
imperial forms of exploitation, I argue that repositioning empire within the politics of the
present would enable the conception of time to be reshaped. This thesis examines a selection
of twenty-first-century South African fiction to analyze temporal dimensions of the processes
that sustain, govern, and justify systemic injustices that cheapen both human and nonhuman
lives. My corpus consists of four novels and a short story collection: Phaswane Mpe’s
Welcome to Our Hillbrow (Mpe 2001), Kgebetli Moele’s Room 207 (Moele 2006), Ivan
Vladislavić’s The Exploded View (Vladislavić 2004), Lauren Beukes’s Zoo City (Beukes
2010), and Karen Jayes’s For the Mercy of Water (Jayes 2012). Analyzing how the present is
constituted under late capitalism in South Africa, I examine how these works bring to light the
temporal quality of empire, which reflects and reproduces social, economic, and
environmental damage. This damage, both material and epistemological, underlies the
structural inequalities that govern the imperial formations persisting under globalism today,
both in South Africa and beyond.
My work proposes the notion of “ruinscape” for literary and cultural analysis, as
referring not simply to damaged space, but as the spatial representation of negative social,
economic, and environmental processes across historical periods that interpenetrate each
other. This negative temporalization of space is marked by the socio-environmental erasure of
peripheral spaces, the displacement of vulnerable individuals and classes, and the distancing
of these spaces from public awareness. Ruinscapes are physical settings and structural
formations that are both the outcome and the ongoing processes of ruination. The suffix “-
scape” highlights ruination’s relation to physical or cultural materialities, so that ruinscapes
exemplify both physical and mental ruination processes and durations. How time is
understood shapes how ruination is perceived, and illuminates how ruination escapes the
public consciousness. With reference to this selection of twenty-first-century South African
fiction, I argue that ruinscapes provide temporal vantage points to unpack imperial persistence
and its material consequences. They render the palimpsestic quality of post-apartheid time
apprehensible.