Contagion, a Futurist South African Climate Crisis and a Hidden Drug Pandemic in Mohale Mashigo’s Intruders: Short Stories

Abstract

The article draws on typologies of contagion, particularly matrices and patterns of virality considered here as tropes from the Bakhtinian chronotope. Using this frame, it analyses how society attempts to control crises and contagions in Mohale Mashigo’s speculative stories, “Untitled i,” “Untitled ii,” and “Ghost Strain N.” The Foucauldian notion of heterotopic juxtaposition of spaces complements the trope of contagion in unpacking how Mashigo’s characters encounter their specific forms of disasters and epidemics in ways that conform to past mass contagions and also break with those. In its focus on continuities and discontinuities regarding typologies of epidemics and pandemics, the article considers Mashigo’s use of African science fiction and fantasy (speculative fiction) to depict the life experiences and flight from an unfolding climate disaster to another galaxy in “Untitled i” and “Untitled ii,” and the spread of a drug epidemic in a fictional Johannesburg township in “Ghost Strain N.” It argues that we can understand these stories by making heterotopic linkages with the present Covid-19 and various life-changing crises and infections that humanity has encountered, is facing right now and will encounter as it moves with time and strives for survival.