Writing Ecological Revolution from Millennial South Africa: History, Nature, and the Post-Apartheid Present

This article does two key things. Firstly, it offers a perspective on histories of South African political economy refracted through the lens of "world-ecological" thinking (Moore, Capitalism 2–5). It maps the organisations of institutionalised apartheid and the liberal democracy that has succeeded it in terms of capital's cyclical regimentations of nature. This approach sheds new light on the entanglements of politics, economics, and environments, which, in specific ways over the course of the twentieth century and into the millennial present, have shaped and characterised unevenness in South Africa. Secondly, in light of these ideas, the article considers Zinaid Meeran's Tanuki Ichiban (2012), Henrietta Rose-Innes' Nineveh (2011), and Lauren Beukes' Moxyland (2008), twenty-first-century texts exemplary of an increasingly prominent "speculative" impulse in contemporary South African literary production. I situate the extraordinary human and extra-human vocabularies of these fictions as responsive to shifting historical constructions of "Nature" in neoliberalising South Africa. I further argue that the narratives are sensitive to the structures of these historical and ongoing regimentations—to how they concatenate and overlay one another in the millennial present. Finally, I suggest that with recourse to speculative poetics, the texts seek to offer alternative conceptual vocabularies to those from which systematic violences continue to proceed.