Surviving the African Anthropocene: Dilman Dila’s mutational aesthetics

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buir.contributor.authorWright, Timothy
dc.citation.epage157en_US
dc.citation.issueNumber2en_US
dc.citation.spage142en_US
dc.citation.volumeNumber50en_US
dc.contributor.authorWright, Timothy
dc.date.accessioned2021-03-31T05:50:37Z
dc.date.available2021-03-31T05:50:37Z
dc.date.issued2019
dc.departmentDepartment of English Language and Literatureen_US
dc.description.abstractMatthew 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.provenanceSubmitted 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.provenanceMade 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: 2019en
dc.identifier.doi10.2979/reseafrilite.50.2.10en_US
dc.identifier.eissn1527-2044
dc.identifier.issn0034-5210
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/11693/76045
dc.language.isoEnglishen_US
dc.publisherIndiana University Pressen_US
dc.relation.isversionofhttps://doi.org/10.2979/reseafrilite.50.2.10en_US
dc.source.titleResearch in African Literaturesen_US
dc.titleSurviving the African Anthropocene: Dilman Dila’s mutational aestheticsen_US
dc.typeArticleen_US

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