ABSTRACT
This study explores the conjunction of speculative envisioning and historical situatedness in the writing of Mohale Mashigo by focusing on the figure of the therianthrope, a half-human, half-animal hybrid which appears in The Yearning and Intruders. The significance of therianthropism for understanding this particular dialectic of imagination and history is elaborated through a close reading of two stories in Intruders, namely “Manoka” and “The High Heel Killer”. This reading is interested in the ways in which therianthropism facilitates a kind of generic mixing, bringing together tropes of genre fiction and more realist preoccupations. In particular, the analysis charts how the therianthropes in the stories present diagnoses and possible transformations of gender politics in South Africa, and how they embody the paradox of Mashigo’s foreword to Intruders, a provocative disavowal of Afrofuturism. Seeking to enrich speculative fiction with the identitarian particularity that she claims Afrofuturism marginalises – that is, with a Black African phenomenology – Mashigo also opens her prose to transcultural and transhistorical, that is, to more “universal” mythologies and artistic traditions through the portrayal of therianthropism.
