Like other offenders in this fictional world, designated “aposymbiots” or “zoos,” she literally carries the stigma of her guilt with her in the form of an animal familiar, a sloth, to which she is inextricably bound (Beukes 2010, 9, 157). Its protagonist, formerly middle-class and former addict Zinzi December, has served time in prison for her complicity in the drug-related murder of her brother. Zoo City, Lauren Beukes’ second work of speculative fiction ( 2010), propels its readers into a zone estranged by ontological fracture, yet one whose spatial coordinates mimic those of its extratextual referent – the city of Johannesburg. #WITS AND WAGERS QUESTIONS ABOUT DRUGS ARCHIVE#My essay turns to Zoo City to offer three vignettes that trace the flows of water and the contiguous presence of infrastructures in Johannesburg, pursuing their intersection beyond the boundaries of the novel into a larger expressive cultural archive to reflect on the relations between privilege and forms of anthropogenic degradation in the life of the city. Alternately foregrounded or barely perceptible until deliberately sought out, water helps to distinguish the various locales of the novel from one another. Taking my cue from Beukes' infrastructural allusions, I mobilize her text to provide the struts for my own as I explore the intertextuality of Zoo City with works by William Kentridge and Sarah Gertrude Millin. The novel propels its readers into a noiresque fantasy world whose spatial coordinates closely reflect the extra-textual city of Johannesburg. It sets these strategies to work in the context of Lauren Beukes' second work of speculative fiction, Zoo City (Beukes, Lauren. What opportunities does it afford for hydrocolonial analysis, given Isabel Hofmeyr's anchoring of that term in oceanic studies? How might a hydrocolonial orientation defamiliarize the relations between surface and depths that have shaped influential recent accounts of the city? This article outlines the contours of a “hydrocolonial Johannesburg” though combining Isabel Hofmeyr, Charne Lavery and Sarah Nuttall's invitation to “read for water” with existing methodologies that read for infrastructure. Johannesburg is a landlocked city, famously the largest human concentration in the southern hemisphere not located on a river.
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