• The Ethics of Waste in Zoë Wicomb’s You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town

    Author(s):
    Ian Whittington (see profile)
    Date:
    2014
    Subject(s):
    African literature, Ecocriticism, Postmodernism, Literature
    Item Type:
    Article
    Tag(s):
    Apartheid, short stories, south african literature, waste, zoe wicomb, Postcolonial literature, World literature
    Permanent URL:
    http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M61R4J
    Abstract:
    Zoë Wicomb’s You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town (1987) uses bodily and material waste to figure larger social processes of marginalization, dispossession, and racial abjection during the apartheid era. As the apartheid regime sought to devalue black and “coloured” lives, while simultaneously profiting from their land and labor, it pushed non-white South Africans into dangerous proximity to hazardous and unseemly waste. Waste, in You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town, becomes both metonymy and metaphor. Wicomb not only uses it to index the historical and material processes of abjection that obtained in twentieth-century South Africa; she also takes up garbage, feces, vomit, and other refuse as an ethical lens for the consideration of how individual and collective subjectivities are formed by what is thrown away. In its relationship to waste of all kinds, the individual body becomes a site in which social processes of acceptance and disavowal play out.
    Metadata:
    xml
    Published as:
    Journal article     Show details
    Pub. Date:
    2014
    Journal:
    Safundi
    Volume:
    14
    Issue:
    3
    Page Range:
    327 - 344
    Status:
    Published
    Last Updated:
    6 years ago
    License:
    Attribution
    Share this:

    Downloads

    Item Name: pdf the_ethics_of_waste_in_zoe_wicombs_you_c.pdf
      Download View in browser
    Activity: Downloads: 807

    Back to Deposits