What are the shape(s) of warfare and conflict in the allegedly post-historical, post-human, technocratic age? In a world altered by the technocratic paradigm, has our realist optic, founded on a ...witnessing that focuses on the surface appearance of things and a rhetoric framed by neo-liberal epistemology and desires, blinded us to the current changeable nature(s) and layerings of war and conflict? War is either seen as an abnormal happening in a faraway country, often defined as a dispute and not a war, or else it alters from a spectacular coordination of brute violence to a socio-economic inducement of fear, panic, social mobilisation/dispersion, and control in the particles of everyday life. During long periods of slow conflict nations leak away, people become metronomes, cultures are sapped of resilience, languages evaporate, existences are rendered irrelevant. How does writing bear witness to this spectrum of violence and reveal the technocratic paradigm underlying the sutures?
On 31 December 2019, scientists announced to the world the discovery of a new strain of coronavirus, COVID-19, in the city of Wuhan, China. COVID-19 soon spread globally, and by March had been ...declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization. In that same month, South Africa began a nationwide lockdown, which was divided into various stages, implemented according to the severity of the pandemic and its potential to cause extreme and rapid loss of life, particularly among South Africa's vulnerable populations. The impact of COVID-19 further exposed all the wounds and ruptures within contemporary society. Using the poetry of Mxolisi Nyezwa and Angifi Dladla as an analytical lens, this article critiques the distinction between a recognized state of disaster and the everyday state of violence in which the marginalized live and argues that the precarious are living in a state of continuous disaster. It recognizes the vitality and power of critique through literature that engages with the actuality of the present moment. Furthermore, it foregrounds the term 'the actual' as preferable to 'the real' or 'reality,' framed as those terms are by realist epistemologies and the heroic materialism of real capitalism.
With poems that convey concisely the existential state of living in precarity, Mxolisi Nyezwa offers a unique and crucial voice in South African literature. This article discusses representations of ...precarity and related concepts of "slow death" (Berlant 2007), "slow violence" (Nixon 2011), and "cruel optimism" (Berlant 2011), focusing on several selected poems from Nyezwa's (2011) volume Malikhanye. The article engages with his ability to react to precarity via the revitalisation of language and the effective mobilisation of innovative aesthetic strategies. Nyezwa's poems foreground the precarity that has been experienced through socio-politico-economic factors, including the often neglected factor of environmental degradation; they also emphasise the process(es) of grieving and the concept of grievability, and encourage an embrace of human vulnerability, while simultaneously connecting personal loss to the greater context of societal precarity. His work reveals that a revitalisation of poetic language can react to and challenge precarity.
