Surviving the African Anthropocene: Dilman Dila’s mutational aesthetics
buir.contributor.author | Wright, Timothy | |
dc.citation.epage | 157 | en_US |
dc.citation.issueNumber | 2 | en_US |
dc.citation.spage | 142 | en_US |
dc.citation.volumeNumber | 50 | en_US |
dc.contributor.author | Wright, Timothy | |
dc.date.accessioned | 2021-03-31T05:50:37Z | |
dc.date.available | 2021-03-31T05:50:37Z | |
dc.date.issued | 2019 | |
dc.department | Department of English Language and Literature | en_US |
dc.description.abstract | Matthew Omelsky has recently coined the term “African Anthropocene” to describe how the intertwined crises wrought by global capitalism and man-made ecological disaster have disproportionately affected the African continent. This paper discusses a short story collection by the Ugandan writer Dilman Dila, A Killing in the Sun (2014), as one instance of an African aesthetics that uniquely registers and responds to this dual crisis. I focus in particular on the “vampire story” that opens this collection, arguing that Dila not only reinvents, but, in critical ways, “mutates” the canonical Euro-American vampire figure. In reimagining the aristocratic European vampire as a mutant, genetically modified swarm of mosquitos, Dila’s story suggests new, environmental forms of the monstrous emerging at the confluence of ecological catastrophe and corporate neocolonialism. At the same time, I show how Dila’s fiction draws on the history of colonialism in Africa in imagining modes of survival within this vampiric ecology. In order to unpack the political implications of what I call Dila’s “mutational aesthetics,” I trace Dila’s attempts to imagine forms of human-nonhuman entanglement that delink from a Western episteme and its ideological carapace of “the human,” providing instead post-humanist visions of survival and refuge. | en_US |
dc.description.provenance | Submitted by Zeynep Aykut (zeynepay@bilkent.edu.tr) on 2021-03-31T05:50:37Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Surviving_the_african_anthropocene_on_dilman_dila_s_mutant_fictions.pdf: 287794 bytes, checksum: d92f13b1541371d417c0127ce400f813 (MD5) | en |
dc.description.provenance | Made available in DSpace on 2021-03-31T05:50:37Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Surviving_the_african_anthropocene_on_dilman_dila_s_mutant_fictions.pdf: 287794 bytes, checksum: d92f13b1541371d417c0127ce400f813 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2019 | en |
dc.identifier.doi | 10.2979/reseafrilite.50.2.10 | en_US |
dc.identifier.eissn | 1527-2044 | |
dc.identifier.issn | 0034-5210 | |
dc.identifier.uri | http://hdl.handle.net/11693/76045 | |
dc.language.iso | English | en_US |
dc.publisher | Indiana University Press | en_US |
dc.relation.isversionof | https://doi.org/10.2979/reseafrilite.50.2.10 | en_US |
dc.source.title | Research in African Literatures | en_US |
dc.title | Surviving the African Anthropocene: Dilman Dila’s mutational aesthetics | en_US |
dc.type | Article | en_US |
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