Littoral Uncertainties : Water, women and climate precarity in South African literature.

Abstract

This dissertation plots the trans-temporal applications of the littoral in South African literature. According to Meg Samuelson, the littoral maps the point of contact between land and water which confounds the easy boundaries between land and sea. The littoral, as a speculative device and as an ecotone, is subject to haphazard ocean tides and ambiguous conditions. It facilitates porosity and allows for open ended global flows, while also containing hidden depths and tenuous undercurrents. By extension, I argue that the littoral provides a framework with which to read our current socio-political context in a post-transitional South Africa. The authors examined in this dissertation reflect on the convergences between time and the littoral. In Chapter 1, I analyse the temporal bleed from the 1850s to 1994 and into the present, as depicted in Zakes Mda’s The Heart of Redness and Jacklyn Cock’s Writing the Ancestral River. Mda and Cock’s narratives are framed through the histories of the rivers of the Eastern Cape, the ocean that borders it and the people who occupy the shores. In Chapter 2 Henrietta Rose-Innes’s novel Nineveh and N.R. Brodie’s Three Bodies trace the present manifestations of the littoral in the contemporary cities of Johannesburg and Cape Town. Finally, in Chapter 3, Masande Ntshanga’s expansive work Triangulum pivots towards possible imagined littoral futures, following an unnamed protagonist who receives signals from a mysterious machine about the end of the world. When read successively, this dissertation illustrates the fluctuation of the past, present and future as they fold in on one another. I argue that littoral temporalities are a significant stylistic and conceptual turn from the pre-existing binary logic of South African social and political architecture, as it gives way to more complex and ambiguous threads of connection. I show how the littoral also permits a grounded realism when engaging with these future imaginings. It simultaneously holds space for threatening and dangerous futures, along with ones that are hopeful and hospitable.