Noir Affect in Lauren Beukes’s Zoo City

Abstract

Taking its cue from Christopher Breu and Elizabeth A. Hatmaker’s rethinking of noir affect as a descriptor of detective fiction, this paper contributes to the discussion of South African writer Lauren Beukes’s Zoo City as a narrative that both harnesses and fluidifies the generic conventions of the crime thriller. Pondering Beukes’s claim that her story may become the site for the transmutation or transmission of ethically adjusted emotion, the paper resorts to Lauren Berlant’s thoughts on detective fiction as a genre condensing the “cruel optimism” of the ordinary, rather than the evental, present to explore the clues of affectional attunement in Lauren Beukes’s postapartheid novel.

Keywords

• noir affect
• crime fiction
• muti noir
• lauren beukes
• cruel optimism