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Ways of Desiring: Postcolonial Affect in Zakes Mda’s The Whale Caller
- Configurations
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 25, Number 1, Winter 2017
- pp. 57-88
- 10.1353/con.2017.0002
- Article
- Additional Information
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This essay offers a Deleuzean reading of desire in the relationship between the eponymous protagonist of Zakes Mda’s The Whale Caller (2005) and a whale named Sharisha. In the setting of a highly stratified ecotourist village in South Africa where most characters relate to marine animals only through consumption and capitalization, the human-whale relationship between the protagonist and Sharisha offers a different mode of comportment. While some Animal Studies scholars read the novel as evidence of animal subjectivity and call for a recognition of animal rights in South African law, this essay contends that the novel’s more significant contribution to ecocritical thought is its insistence on positing nonhuman desire as a mode of resistance to neocolonial capitalist violence. The essay also engages this discussion of nonhuman desire as resistance with postcolonial critiques of both resistance literature and posthuman accounts of subjectivity.