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This piece is drawn from a larger project that asks what it might mean to write a cultural history or “biography” of the longest highway in South Africa, the N2. Influenced by literature on the eve...

Environmental narratives have become an increasingly important area of study in the environmental humanities. Rob Nixon has drawn attention to the difficulties of representing the complex processes of environmental change that inflict ‘slow violence’ on vulnerable human (and non-human) populations. Nixon argues that a lack of “arresting stories, images and symbols” reduces the visibility of gradual problems such as biodiversity loss, climate change and chemical pollution in cultural imaginations and on political agendas. We agree with Nixon that addressing this representational imbalance is an important mission for the environmental humanities. However, we argue that another aspect of the same imbalance, or representational bias, suggests the inverse of this is also needed—to unpack the ways that complicated and multifaceted environmental phenomena can be reduced to fast, simple, evocative, invasive narratives that percolate through science, legislation, policy and civic action, and to examine how these narratives can drown out rather than open up possibilities for novel social-ecological engagements. In this article we demonstrate the idea of invasive narratives through a case study of the ‘invasive alien species' (IAS) narrative in South Africa. We suggest that IAS reduces complex webs of ecological, biological, economic, and cultural relations to a simple ‘good’ versus ‘bad’ battle between easily discernible ‘natural’ and ‘non-natural’ identities. We argue that this narrative obstructs the options available to citizens, land managers and policy-makers and prevents a more nuanced understanding of the dynamics and implications of biodiversity change, in South Africa and beyond.

Research seminar, research cluster, research output. The word is almost a fetish within the contemporary academy—but what does “research” actually mean in a discipline like literature? And what happens when a research project overspills its bounds, or pushes up against disciplinary limits and protocols? In this piece, I explore such questions via the figure of Demetrios Tsafendas, the "mad Greek" who assassinated apartheid Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd in 1966, supposedly acting on instructions from a tapeworm inside him. It is one of the strangest facts in South African history; it is also, of course, a kind of fiction, and one that has been refracted into a range of literary and artistic works. Reading across both official and “creative” archives, I address a range of methodological problems that I encountered in attempting an academic treatment of Tsafendas and his (as the presiding apartheid judge put it) “useless life”.

This piece explores recent literary re-creations of the early Dutch East India Company (VOC) years at the Cape of Good Hope, concentrating on Dan Sleigh's Eilande (2002, trans. Andre Brink, 2005) to examine how an archivist turned novelist uses the textual ‘islands’ provided by official documentation to create a huge prose work that is remarkable for placing the seventeenth-century settlement in its properly global colonial context. Surely this region's most exhaustive rendering of the genre known problematically as ‘the historical novel’, it ranges from Germany and Holland via St Helena and the Cape to Madagascar, Mauritius and Batavia. And if for Brink ‘the lacunae in the archives are most usefully filled through magical realism, metaphor and fantasy’, (Coetzee and Nuttall, Negotiating the Past, 3), I suggest that Sleigh's work forms an opposite pole, offering an example of a much slower, lonelier genesis and a more cautious recovery of historical specificity. I hope to discern the possibilitie...

This paper emerges from a symposium held at the University of Cape Town in May 2012 to mark the 50 th anniversary of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring . Hosted by the Institute for the Humanities in Africa (HUMA), the event was intended to explore the contemporary resonances of Carson’s text from the global South, and also to consider the emerging field of the environmental humanities. Writers, historians, literary scholars and social anthropologists were asked to intervene in debates where the voices of natural scientists are typically more prominent. Rachel Carson’s work is often praised (and sometimes condemned) for its simplicity and lyricism, its “sensitive literary style”. My engagement with Silent Spring explores this idea of literariness, tracing the formal qualities and rhetorical strategies of her oeuvre : the ecology of allusion and quotation that it generates, the metaphors and genres that it draws on. In doing so, it argues that the celebrated accessibility of her writing is in fact a carefully worked-for effect. The simplicity of Silent Spring, in other words, is more complex than it first appears: a quality that lent the book much of its power, yet also rendered it vulnerable in other ways. At the same time, I hope to read Carson’s public science writing alongside the anti-globalisation protest of Arundhati Roy, probing the relation between the simple and the complex in contemporary environmentalism. Both turned their attention to explicitly instrumental writing after winning fame for more “literary” texts; both questioned the credibility of the male expert; and both deployed the intimate address of the essay form for polemical effect. Yet equally, Roy’s work allows one to see how Carson’s version of environmentalism looks from the developing world: how the ideas of ecology, toxicity and “slow violence” that Silent Spring did much to introduce into public culture might play out in a postcolony like South Africa.

In Zadie Smith’s 2008 essay on Forster, one novelist considers the difficulty of placing another within literary history: Forster is not an Edwardian but not quite a Modernist either; not reactiona...

Walking up the slopes of Table Mountain on Woolsack Drive, one soon reaches the Cape Dutch cottage the road is named after: whitewashed curvilinear gables and teak shutters just visible behind the security gates of what is now a postgraduate residence. The Woolsack was commissioned by Cecil John Rhodes, mining magnate, sometime Cape prime minister and fervent builder of the British Empire. Designed by Rhodes’s protégé, the architect Herbert Baker, this sunny atrium protected from the winds that buffet Devil’s Peak was first occupied by that empire’s most famous chronicler: Rudyard Kipling.