ABSTRACT
Despite a recent focus on animal lives in postcolonial ecocriticism, the animal body remains a potential site of anxiety in relation to the postcolonial thanks to histories of placing colonial life on the animal spectrum. South African writer Lauren Beukes uses human, monstrous, and animal bodies to explore the legacy of the state’s dehumanizing language and policies of the twentieth century in her postapartheid dystopias Moxyland and Zoo City. This chapter considers Beukes’s consistent effacement of the border between human and nonhuman worlds, and argues that she interrogates the continuing legacies of human rights violations by violating the structural integrity of the human subject in her fiction.
