(Un)Lawful Subjects of Company

Abstract

This essay engages Cape Town – a city founded as a tavern of the seas linking Atlantic and Indian Ocean trade routes – by tracing the ways in which its foundation as seventeenth-century Dutch East India Company settlement resonates as metaphor through which to approach the contemporary corporate city. Rereading the Journal of Jan van Riebeeck through the lens of Ishtiyaq Shukri's The Silent Minaret and, particularly, Dan Sleigh's Islands, it explores the Journal's mutually informed production of crime and profit. It then turns to a set of recent thrillers – by Andrew Brown, Deon Meyer, Margie Orford, Roger Smith, Mike Nicol and Joanne Hitchens – as a way of reading the post-apartheid city. Finally, it engages Lauren Beukes' Moxyland, in which corporate Cape Town takes concrete form in a virtual society, before closing with reflections on the limits of the Company archive, the alternative archives it overwrote and erased and the potentialities of what it forecloses, including the common and the creole.