Speaker
Description
The proposed paper discusses representations of embodied mobility practices in recent South African science-fiction tracing the ways in which cultural representations of enforced mobilities are constructed. Engaging with Sheller’s theorization on Mobility Justice (2018) and critical Black Mobilities, the paper addresses the construction of (im)mobilities as well as their inherent potential to form decolonising counter-narratives. For this purpose, the paper analysis the depiction of mobility in a selection of recent South African science-fiction, such as the film District 9 (2009) as well as the short stories ‘Poison’ (H. Rose-Innes 2008) and ‘What Pushes Against This Moment’ (VH Ncube 2022). I argue that the aesthetic strategies of postcolonial science-fiction and Africanfuturism in South African representations of mobility have a distancing effect that allows for an intricate engagement with the real world’s past and present uneven mobilities (Cresswell 2014, 2016).
These texts problematise the mobility of racialised bodies by introducing aliens, time travel, and toxic environmental disasters that ask which privileges it takes to be considered (im)mobile and (un)free. The audiences are confronted with (physically) deteriorating whiteness that is too immobile to escape disaster and a black subjecthood capable of moving from the present through the past into a more just future thus turning established modern Western discourses on racialized (im)mobility upside down. South African speculative fiction alienates established perspectives of (post)colonial mobilities as a commentary on the long durée of mobile itineraries of transatlantic slavery and colonial conquest. The analysis shows how speculative aesthetics are used to embed narratives of subversive mobility into existing discourses of the racialisation of non-white bodies stressing the importance to envision more just mobility futures.
Biography
S. U. Kriegel is a research associate at Universität Hildesheim and a lecturer at the department of English Studies at Freie Universität Berlin, where she is also a PhD candidate. She has taught a variety of classes on anglophone and South African culture, media, and the history of the British Empire and has published on mobility in South African fiction. Other research interests include petromasculinity, gendered spaces, and postcolonial mobilities.
