The relationship between futurity and the rurality and urbanity of spaces in the queer African science fiction of Triangulum by Masande Ntshanga

Abstract

The science fiction novel Triangulum (Cape Town: Umuzi, 2019) by Masande Ntshanga challenges both the association of the queer with the urban and the use of the city as symbol for the future in science fiction. The verisimilitude of the life of a queer teenager in the rural Eastern Cape of South Africa—a type of rural queer existence not often depicted in literature—is represented in the novel. While the unnamed narrator of the novel does eventually, like many queer characters, leave her rural background behind in order to move to Johannesburg, the Johannesburg of the future is portrayed in dystopian terms. In this novel the future that the city symbolises is the result of extractive and exploitative capitalism. This vision of the future is rejected as unsustainable and unethical. In order to enable another, more hopeful future, the narrator has to return to the rural and embrace ways of living which, like the rural, are associated with the past. The novel's advocacy of a return to pre-industrial Africa can be considered anti- or decolonial, since it complicates and ultimately rejects Western conceptions of temporality and progress. It can also be considered in terms of José Esteban Muñoz's argument that a queer utopia is necessary to prompt political action in the present (Cruising Utopia. New York: New York University Press, 2009). Like Muñoz, Triangulum rejects a future which consists of a reproduction of the present; instead, it holds out hope for a radically different utopian future.