Shining Girls

Safundi
The Journal of South African and American Studies
ISSN: 1753-3171 (Print) 1543-1304 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rsaf20
Shining girls and forgotten men in Lauren Beukes’

urban “America”
Andrea Spain
To cite this article: Andrea Spain (2017) Shining girls and forgotten men in Lauren Beukes’ urban
“America”, Safundi, 18:3, 258-278, DOI: 10.1080/17533171.2017.1329855
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/17533171.2017.1329855
Published online: 26 Jun 2017.
Submit your article to this journal
Article views: 74
View related articles
View Crossmark data
Citing articles: 1 View citing articles
Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rsaf20
Safundi: THE JOURNAL OF SOUTH AFRICAN AND AMERICAN STUDIES, 2017
VOL. 18, NO. 3, 258–278
https://doi.org/10.1080/17533171.2017.1329855
Shining girls and forgotten men in Lauren Beukes’ urban

“America”
Andrea Spain
Department of English, Mississippi State University, Starkville, MS, USA
ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
Following Achille Mbembe’s understanding of the “aesthetics of Feminist narrative;
superfluity,” this article argues that in her novels set in the US, Broken Lauren Beukes; Shining
Monsters and The Shining Girls, Lauren Beukes images the displacement Girls; Broken Monsters;
and condensation of a rising global political unconscious. I argue that South African literature;
infrastructural unconscious
her novels underscore the violent drive of a white male imaginary that
takes part in both US and South African infrastructural urban histories.
Beukes dramatizes the eruptive racist and misogynistic violence that
occurs when “the subject” of the former center is unable to construct
a satisfying narrative of his objective circumstances, particularly when
the nation, or more accurately global capitalism, has not made good
on its promised narrative of “the good life.” The novels thus provide
cautionary tales for the rise of white nationalism in the present while
providing an ex-centric peoples’ history of American cities through
the Afropolis.
Upon leaving the US to return to South Africa in September of 2014, Lauren Beukes tweeted
“G’bye America and thanks for all the fish. I’m leaving with a TV deal for Broken Monsters
in the works and a freaking suitcase full of books.”1 Beukes echoes science fiction fandom’s
farewell inspired by Douglas Adams’s dolphins who ascend to another plane of existence
given the earth’s apocalyptic demise. The tweet seems to speak to the fans of her own fiction,
including the executive producer of the would-be series, Scott Aversano, who reflects that
Beukes’ novel captures “our” culture’s fascination with horror.2 At the same time, her farewell
might also provocatively express gratitude for all she has gleaned from the decimated rust
belt cities of the United States (given their apocalyptic demise?) while also emphasizing
her position as a writer between two worlds, that of the US and South Africa. Similarly, the
tweet nods to her status as a writer between genres, one who navigates the misogynist roots
of horror and science fiction while creating cross-genre feminist narratives. Aversano reads
CONTACT Andrea Spain ads506@msstate.edu @laurenbeukes

1
Beukes, “Goodbye America.”
2
Presumably, Aversano is speaking to the “American” preoccupation with horror; however, the “our” of Broken Monster’s
fantasmatic preoccupations will become the crux of this essay, signaling on the one hand the circuitry between US and
South African imaginaries, while on the other pointing to a potentially more global merging of dominant affective align-
ments, particularly of white audiences of the Global North, a consolidation of fantasmatic attachment. Deadline Team,
“Broken Monsters.”
© 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
SAFUNDI: THE JOURNAL OF SOUTH AFRICAN AND AMERICAN STUDIES 259
Beukes’ brilliance in her ability to manipulate genre, delivering the audience supernatural
thrills. Of Broken Monsters (2014) he says: “Her clever choice to explore [our culture’s fas-
cination with horror] within the constructs of a supernatural novel – especially one which
presents its own horribleness so elegantly – is a delightful paradox.”3 Emphasizing the
popular glitz of the supernatural, we might easily anticipate what a screen version of Broken
Monsters might look like, something like the glossy Sense8, a Netflix-style serial that moves
perspectivally between characters and jumps through time, space, and digital and actual
realities. In contrast to this popular response, the literary reception of Beukes’ urban novels,
which also include Moxyland (2008), Zoo City (2010), and The Shining Girls (2013), reads
her work as complex infrastructural palimpsests in which, for example – as Jessica Dickson
writes of Zoo City – “multivalent possibilities for representing modes of African urbanity are
simultaneously technological, mystical, cosmopolitan, futurist and persistently haunted by
both the occult and the past.”4 Yet, even given the contrast between culture industry brand-
ing and the ability of critical analysis to emphasize the specificity of each novel’s complex
intertwining of cultural imaginaries and histories, ironically, both approaches highlight
technological and artistic forms through which the unconscious might, in Beukes’ words,
“vent.”5 Beukes’ popular reception in particular might prompt us to ask what exactly in her
work makes these novels so appealing to US readers and potential viewers. Where and how,
in fact, does the “American” unconscious vent in these South African texts?
Following Achille Mbembe’s understanding of the “aesthetics of superfluity,” this article
argues that in her two novels set in the US, Broken Monsters and The Shining Girls, Lauren
Beukes images the displacement and condensation of a rising global political unconscious. I
argue that her novels underscore the violent drive of a white male imaginary that takes part
in both US and South African infrastructural urban histories that might serve as cautionary
tales for the global rise of white nationalism in the present. In addition to my reading of
this “venting,” my infrastructural readings of her novels contribute to a critical focus on
the urban materiality of precarious lives scavenging both ideologically and economically
within cultural histories that produce both subjects and the stuff of their tenacity. I chart how
characters in her novels emerge as both infrastructure of the city in Abdoumaliq Simone’s
sense and as critique of social oppression in both South Africa and more globally. In his
essay, “People as Infrastructure: Intersecting Fragments in Johannesburg,” Simone argues
that the conjunctive nature of city life – its objects, its dynamic and shifting organization of
space, and its residents’ bodily practices – becomes structural ensembles “where the energies
of individuals can be most efficiently deployed and accounted for,” even as they “provid[e]
for and reproduc[e] life in the city.”6 In the South African context, writing characters as
emphasized by Achille Mbembe, “which is premised on the capacity of things to hypnotize,
overexcite, or paralyze the senses,” even as they expose “the dialectics of indispensability
and expendability of both labor and life, people and things.”7 Read critically according to
3
Deadline Team, “Broken Monsters.”
4
Dickson, “Reading the (Zoo) City,” 67.
5
See Ria Misra’s interview with Beukes, “Lauren Beukes Explains How to Tell Great Stories About The Internet.” Speaking about
the presence of the internet in Broken Monsters but as easily applicable to forms of art and writing, Beukes states, “I was
interested in creativity and thwarted ambition, in how much it means to us to be seen, to be recognized, how likes and shares
and RTs have become an indicator for how we value ourselves, how art needs an audience, anonymity and obfuscating your
identity, dreams and the unconscious and the Internet as Id, where the subconscious can vent, losing yourself to the work.”
6
Simone, “People as Infrastructure,” 68–9.
7
Mbembe, “Aesthetics of Superfluity,” 38.
260 A. SPAIN
Mbembe, urban aesthetics of superfluity render visible “experiences of displacement, sub-

stitution, and condensation, none of which is purely and simply a repetition of a repressed
past but rather a manifestation of traumatic amnesia, and, in some cases, nostalgia or even
mourning.”8
Emphasizing the dialectics of the paradoxical “indispensability and expendability of
both labor and life, people and things,”9 Shane Graham’s article on Zoo City’s interwoven
themes of “subterranean caves and excavations [and] fear of invasion and contamination”10
might be understood as demonstrating the anxiety of infrastructural superfluity evidenced
in “the entropy of built things.”11 In his reading, “far from being a subversive space free
from surveillance and control,” the caves and storm drains of Johannesburg “most effec-
tively lay bare the structures and histories underlying the slick surfaces of the postmodern
city.”12 Furthermore, Graham argues that the protagonist’s utilization and exploration of
the underground spaces reveal what Neil Lazarus calls the “postcolonial unconscious,”
insofar as they figure the “anxiety and fears that pervade the imagination of postapartheid,
post-transition city dwellers and their attitudes towards modernity and the incursions of
newness.”13 Furthermore, the tropes illustrate the displacement emphasized by Mbembe,
as their emblematic fears of invasion and contamination ironically prompt some to feel
nostalgia for the apartheid past, as described by Jacob Dlamini, who asks, “What is it about
the present that makes me cherish shattered fragments of memory?”14 In other words, a
“native nostalgia” emerges in the face of the “indispensability and expendability of both
labor and life, people and things.”15
Jessica Dickson also highlights the layers of history “embedded in … the city’s built envi-
ronment.” However, in contrast to underscoring anxieties of late modernity, she argues that
in contemporary postcolonial science fiction16 “new claims to urbanity are being made by
subjects previously relegated to the townships at the peripheries of the city or ostensibly
‘ruralized’ under apartheid’s infamous redistribution of people onto a colonial landscape.”17
The types of characters-as-infrastructure that people Moxyland and Zoo City also populate,
re-make, and reclaim pockets of US urban landscapes in Broken Monsters and The Shining
Girls: hustlers, journalists, recovering addicts (or those failing recovery), sex workers,
squatters, police, criminals, and artists. The rich and varied characters’ itineraries create
palimpsests of the peculiar histories of segregation, integration, and new forms of economic
apartheid in both the United States and South Africa, rendering the familiar uncanny, and
the new and strange oddly recognizable. In all of Beukes’ work, we find a writing of the
“ex-centric,” in Jean Comaroff ’s terms, an “instructive disorientation that comes of looking at
our own world from … a place beyond the traditional heartland of Euro-America,”18 even if,
8
Ibid.
9
Ibid.
10
Graham, “The Entropy of Built Things,” 65.
11
Henrietta Rose-Innes, Nineveh (Cape Town: Umuzi, 2011), quoted in Graham, “The Entropy of Built Things,” 67.
12
Ibid., 72.
13
Ibid., 66.
14
Jacob Dlamini, Native Nostalgia. Jacana Media, 2009, quoted in Graham, “The Entropy of Built Things,” 65.
15
Mbembe, “Aesthetics of Superfluity,” 38.
16
Graham finds “the sci-fi label … an uncomfortable fit,” preferring “speculative fiction,”“urban fantasy … or perhaps the more
literary label of ‘magical realism,’ with strong elements of a crime novel and mystery thriller thrown in,”“The Entropy of Built
Things,” 66. All of this points to increasingly fluid boundaries between crime fiction, fantasy, and science-fiction suggesting
that authors feel the need to draw on the disparate genres’ many conflicting elements to engage the contemporary world.
17
Dickson, “Reading the (Zoo) City,” 69.
18
Quoted in Dickson, 68.
ironically, Beukes’ two most recent novels are now set in that “heartland.” If, as Ronit Frenkel
highlights, Beukes setting her novels in Detroit and Chicago is a way for her to “write about
Johannesburg again,”19 at the same time, Beukes’ two newest books write the specificity of
characters as infrastructure of US rust belt cities’ place, history, cultural formations, and
oppressions. Given the novels’ popularity, this ex-centric reading might well become a part
of US readers’ imaginaries. In other words, if in her earlier novels Beukes wrote postapart-
heid allegories,20 Lauren Beukes might be said to be writing an ex-centric peoples’ history
of American cities through the Afropolis, imaging decimated rust belt cities with pockets
of abandoned, yet artistically “re-naturalized” spaces, as in Broken Monsters’ Detroit, and
charting the highly segregated, uneven development of Chicago in The Shining Girls, both
touching on the “aesthetics of superfluity” of new global forms of the city.
At the same time that these productive readings highlight the nuanced experience of an
infrastructural unconscious, I’d like to suggest that Broken Monsters and The Shining Girls
write another kind of “condensation and displacement,” of “our” contemporary unconscious,
that is becoming more and more global. Whereas most critical insights focus on Beukes’
compelling female and gender-queer characters,21 this article argues that in her two novels
set in the US Beukes also writes the violent drive of white, masculinist characters’ imagi-
naries that take part of both US and South African infrastructural urban histories. In other
words, my focus will highlight the eruptive racist and misogynistic violence that occurs
when “the subject” of the former center is unable to construct a satisfying narrative of his
objective circumstances, particularly when the nation or, more accurately, global capitalism
has not made good on its promised narrative of “the good life” for those who were to have
enjoyed it: white, working-class men.
Significantly, both novels set in the US feature serial killers who are the recognizable
figures of alienated, white, working-class or working poor men: both men are frustrated,
disenfranchised, and impotent to change their lives, and each feels emasculated. As such,
their anxieties are never more felt than in the face of women. For example, Clayton Broom
of Broken Monsters, an artist and the adult son of a long-distance truck driver who died at
age 48, has in his words “versatility” as a skilled laborer that supports his art. He’s learned
welding from “working on armor-plated cars right here in Detroit before they were shipped
off for the first Iraq war. Learned woodwork in a sign factory,”22 but his discourse also reveals
that as a 53-year-old man the jobs are fewer and far between, the money does not go far,
and he is continually passed over for work for younger men. This, however, he reasons,
gives him more time for his art, although he is thwarted in artistic endeavors as well. He
repeatedly gets rejected by curators, and his stint living in a hip artists’ neighborhood, the
now gentrified “Eastern Market,” leaves him feeling more and more emasculated:
He’d hustled his way in among the youngsters, because it felt alive and vibrant: a real arts scene,
like Paris in the twenties, or New York in the seventies, nineties Berlin. But he didn’t fit in.
He was too old, his work was too strange, he didn’t know how to talk to the endless stream
of girls, with their tattoos and bright hair, who came to hang out, to pose for portraits or be
photographed, usually topless, sometimes naked.23
19
Frenkel, “Monsters of World Literature.”
20
See Hoad, “Dystopian Futures, Apartheid, and Postapartheid Allegories,” and the interview of Lauren Beukes by John Joseph
Adams and David Barr Kirtley, Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy Podcast.
21
See Schmidt, “The Girls Who Don’t Die.”
22
Beukes, Broken Monsters, 40.
23
Ibid., 75.
262 A. SPAIN
His paralysis in front of women parallels the stagnancy of his work. He states that “everything
he tried seemed like a dead thing under his hands.”24 We learn this in his opening chapters
as he ruminates while driving for hours, hopped up on Monster energy drinks, OxyContin
and super-strength Tylenol.
The scene reveals that Clayton is just as alienated in his private life, as he attempts to find
a child that he claims as his own while following his ex-girlfriend, Lou, who has recently
lost her job and is clearly on the run. As the scene unfolds, he finds her living out of her
car in the Walmart parking lot next to the Mail Boxes Etc., and we come to understand
that he is stalking her. His fantasy – the satisfying narrative that might suture up a life that
is filled with dead-ends, downward mobility, and failure – is that he will provide a “father
figure” and a stable home “for the boy.” During an exchange with Lou in the parking lot,
Clayton swells up “with unbearable pride at how beautiful [Charlie] was, this little boy.
Better than all his art.”25 Shortly thereafter, however, Lou creates a ruse sending Clayton
into the Walmart to make a purchase for the child, gets back into her car, and races out of
town down a wooded, dark road.
The subsequent ill-fated, high-speed car chase signals Clayton’s break from his attempt to
embody social narratives of respectability and belonging, even as it precipitates his intense
need for recognition as an artist. The chase ends with a sudden crash, and it propels Clayton’s
excitement and recklessness. As he careens off the road, “He let go, let the truck steer where
it wanted,” tempting fate: “let the woods take him.”26 He has hit a deer, a chance occurrence
that, together with this failure of narrative suturing, launches him into his new project: the
deer becomes one of the two corpses sewn together at the torso that will transform his “art.”
The second corpse is Clayton’s first murder victim, the child of an upwardly mobile African-
American family named Daveyton. The structure of Clayton’s crash catapulting him into
his career of relentless, aestheticized violence bears more than a passing resemblance to F.
T. Marinetti’s “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism,” where fissures in narratives of
family, nation, and upward mobility quickly metastasize into psychotic violence. Too often,
the genre of the horror thriller can be read with the emphasis on the individual pathology of
the deranged killer, but comparing Clayton’s crash and artistic transformation to Marinetti’s
fascist mythology allows us to grasp Beukes’ work in its larger political dimension. Like
Clayton’s crises, Marinetti’s futurism begins with failed masculinity; the crises of familial
antagonisms are explicitly connected to the failure of the nation to provide for masculine
subjects.27 Hemmed in by social demands of the traditional bourgeois family and trying to
find a place in a larger national history, Marinetti takes to his car in a burst of pure, unrea-
soning speed. Like Clayton’s crash, it is a gentle figure that forces Marinetti into a ditch as
two bicyclists block his headlong rush.28 The resulting crash functions both as a kind of
24
Ibid., 40.
25
Ibid., 45.
26
Ibid., 49.
27
See for instance Cinzia Sartini Blum’s The Other Modernism. Blum details Marinetti’s struggle with the demands of patriarchal
family structures: “Self-defense then is the primary impetus for Marinetti’s unconventional tirade against marriage and
the family. At stake is the complete destruction of institutions that, because they are in crisis, threaten the foundation of
patriarchy and male identity. Marinetti’s remedy: allow the disease to run its course. Once the old, inefficient sociosymbolic
structures have collapsed, new and revitalized ones may emerge to take their place” (84). It is no accident that in both
Broken Monsters and The Shining Girls, the “disease” runs its course through violence against women, upwardly mobile
people of color, and the poor.
28
Significantly, Marinetti explicitly opposes the sensation of speed to the exercise of reason, the latter represented by the
bicyclists whom he fervently wants to run over.
rebirth and baptism. Crawling out from under the smashed car, Marinetti is reborn as an
artist, ready to fully enter into the project of aestheticized violence. Marinetti writes, “We
intend to glorify war – the only hygiene of the world – militarism, patriotism, the destruc-
tive gesture of anarchists, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and contempt for women.”29 For
Marinetti, there is no ambiguity about how this new art will express its contempt for the
weight and limits of personal and national history: “art can be nothing but violence, cruelty,
and injustice.”30 Where Clayton perceives a personal failure, Marinetti sees a national one,
but both reveal a similar structure in which the dominant narrative’s failure to provide
satisfying subjective coherence, given the objective circumstances of people’s lives, results
in an emergent, psychotic violence and its aestheticization. I argue that this displacement
of symbolic failure, as much as any bodily practice, should be understood as a conjunctive
element when reading people as infrastructure in the paradigmatic global city, and a driving
force of masculinist violence.
Significantly, after the car wreck and immediately before the murder of Daveyton, Clayton
attributes his actions to “the dream” that taps into a kind of unconscious drive of the city. The
dream “navigates the city in Clayton’s body, pulling on his thoughts like strings in a labyrinth
to guide it through the streets,” while his “thoughts are fuzzy things, flickering beneath the
surface, keeping them both alive. [The dream] has to hold onto them, to steer him through
the world, to make the words in Clayton’s mouth come out in the right order.”31 The dream
knows there are “crude and subtle signs”32 of a “current,” the “world beneath the world,”33
that gives hope “that perhaps the world can be twisted and bent.”34 The dream has its own
manifesto. The signs of it are “our nested fears,” such as “the giant black fist”35 that hangs
as a monument to Joe Louis simultaneously signifying boxing and black power; the phallic
GM headquarters towers, “cluster of glass dicks nudged up together for safety;” graffiti
with “squiggled tags that writhe with look-at-me, acknowledge-me, I’m here,” all of which
are tributes to “power and fear.”36 In these cases, the traces of the currents – currents that
might be read as marks of the Lacanian Real – manifest themselves as masculinist cultural
imaginaries, but, according to the dream, the current world is most present in art, “art, most
of all.”37 Art, as Beukes states in an interview with Ria Misra, “needs an audience,” but it also
needs “anonymity and [the] obfuscating [of one’s] identity, dreams and the unconscious …
where the subconscious can vent.”38 Clayton dramatizes this call of the artist, giving himself
over to the dream. As he sits uncomfortably in the formality of the Detroit Institute of Art,
he knows he is close to breaking through to that current world “but he [doesn’t] know how
29
Marinetti, “Founding and Manifesto of Futurism,” 51.
30
Ibid., 52.
31
Beukes, Broken Monsters, 102.
32
Ibid., 103.
33
Ibid., 102.
34
Ibid., 103.
35
Ibid., 91. Beukes’ invocation of the Joe Louis sculpture is significant, as is its irony in relationship to masculinist, fascist
aesthetics. Louis, an African-American, defeated the German boxer Max Schmeling for the heavy weight title in 1938, his
victory often seen as a symbolic defeat of Nazi ideology. The sculpture of his fist has been a lightning rod for controversy
since its erection in 1986, and it was taken by many as an unambiguous endorsement of black power politics. In 2004, the
statue was defaced by two white men from the suburbs. They covered the fist in white paint and left the pictures of two
recently killed white police officers. See Sarah Karush, “Police Arrest Two Men Suspected of Vandalizing Joe Louis Statue.”
USA Today, February 24, 2004. While in this scene the fist becomes resonant with a fascist aesthetics of Detroit that so
fascinate Clayton, he remains oblivious to the racial antagonisms that animate these phallic objects.
36
Ibid., 103.
37
Ibid.
38
Misra, “Lauren Beukes Explains.”
264 A. SPAIN
to cut through.” However, the dream knows how; it thinks it “need[s] life to make life,”39 and
it begins to experiment with bodies: Daveyton is sewn together with the faun; Betty Spinks,
a sculptor who lets Clayton use her studio, becomes the mold for a human–insect hybrid
carapace fired in her own kiln; a hipster artist becomes an eyeless, hybrid creature with
the head and torso of a deer (the other half of the faun, presumably) and the legs of a man
for an installation for “The Dream House Project,” organized by the hipsters, and former
witnesses of Clayton’s aging impotence; and Ramon, an indigent “disciple” of Clayton, who
takes the role of a master of the revels with a “big papa-bear head” in Clayton’s final master-
piece. However, the dream and Clayton know the works are botched, and Clayton remains
sentimental about his horrific corpses: “They weren’t supposed to die, nothing should die.
They were supposed to change.”40 He nonetheless continues to devote himself to the most
horrific acts of violence, while at the same time drawing a chalk door behind each body,
believing that the artistic imagination “will pierce the skin of the world, collapse dimen-
sions, and open the doors and the work will breath and dance in his shoes and the dream
will be able to escape. Ladybug, ladybug, fly away home.”41 He devotes himself to death in
the service of life, taking spectacular violence against others as art, just as Marinetti’s fascist
aesthetic does. Although Marinetti has no time for sentiment, the irony is the same: “are
you astounded? Of course you are, because you can’t even recall having ever been alive.”42
Slavoj Žižek helps us to more clearly understand the stakes of this flight into violence,
art, and affective drive. He writes, “Every violent acting out is a part of a very specific social
ideological constellation, where big ideology” – in this case, family, nation, and upward
mobility – disintegrates. In other words, Žižek argues that when narratives designed to pro-
vide coherence for the subject fail, violence erupts: “… every violent acting out is a sign that
there is something you are not able put into words.”43 With this acting out, a new narrative,
however deranged, has to emerge in place of the former. Clayton has failed “as a man” but is
unable to fully acknowledge that failure. Feeling disposable and forgotten, he thus refashions
his art to aestheticize his violence to transcend the limits of the human. The unconscious
drive that revels in symbolic failure articulated by Marinetti at the beginning of the twentieth
century does more than develop a counternarrative of Italy as a bankrupt nation hobbled
by history. Its fascist affect appeals to the impotence of white men throughout the twenti-
eth century and the start of the twenty-first who feel robbed of the nation’s promise, and
whose hostility and resentment seek easy targets: those perceived as competition, the truly
disenfranchised, and those who would work on their behalf.44 Unable to articulate himself
as “a man” in his historical context, Clayton’s spectacular outburst of violence likewise
becomes coupled with its aetheticization. Clayton withdraws from the world and plans to
re-emerge as a victorious artist. He hopes to reappear with his masterpiece, the gruesome
installation with his broken monsters populating six floors of an abandoned warehouse. His
39
Buekes, Broken Monsters, 103.
40
Ibid., 403.
41
Ibid., 245.
42
43
Žižek, Pervert’s Guide to Ideology.
44
In the tenth point of the founding manifesto, Marinetti declares, “We intend to destroy museums, libraries, and academies
of every sort, and to fight against moralism, feminism, and every utilitarian or opportunistic cowardice,” 51. This anti-egal-
itarian sentiment is almost always coupled with racist violence. Marinetti was a fanatic supporter of colonial wars in both
Libya (1911) and Ethiopia (1934). Written in 1911 and reprinted in 1934, Marinetti states in his essay, “Il futurismo e la
conflagrazione,” that “Nearly all races fear war. The bellicose exuberance of our race prohibits this fear, in fact it forces us to
desire it.” Lalango, Marinetti: The Artist and His Politics, 224.
desire to prove himself as a successful artist to those who would hold him back resonates
with fascistic and nihilistic drive; the peculiar forms of expression of his desire emerge out
of the moment of the crash, signaling both the accumulation of his impotence in the face
of symbolic deadlock and his attempts to suture its rupture.
Forgotten men and shining girls

Like Clayton Broom in Broken Monsters, Harper in The Shining Girls finds himself trying
desperately to construct a narrative that would render his life both coherent and extraor-
dinary. Set in Chicago at the beginning of the Great Depression, The Shining Girls’ serial
killer is a First World War veteran out of work. Harper not only emerges as infrastructure
of a 1930s Chicago cityscape, but, as a time-traveler, he jumps to the 1940s, 1980s, and
early 1990s, doing the bidding of a boarded-up house in an abandoned Southwest side
neighborhood that “calls” to him while he is on the run from police. Having accidentally
just murdered an acquaintance, Jimmy Grebe, in a bar fight, Harper flees the scene and kills
a blind, destitute woman living with her son in the Hooverville who inadvertently draws
attention to him. After the second murder, the violence shifts to pure enjoyment, and Harper
begins the confusing business of constructing a fantasy in which the house demands that he
murders the eponymous shining girls, young women of remarkable potential. The narrative
then alternates between the stories of these extraordinary women, their brutal murders, and
the quest of Kirby, the shining girl who survives an attack, to find and kill Harper. Much
like Clayton, Harper constructs a macabre narrative containing highly aestheticized forms:
objects and women have an internal “shine,” and his baroque killings are elaborated in his
imagination from the time he meets them as little girls until he returns to glean the shine’s
power, killing them as grown women.
Though not an artist himself, Harper’s experience of both the shining girls and the special
objects that reveal the women to him – a My Little Pony, shimmering butterfly wings of a
peepshow dancer decorated in iradium paint, a Jackie Robinson baseball card, a hot metal
typesetting letter “Z” – are marked with incredible aesthetic intensity and the temporal
prose Beukes will allow herself. In one of the earliest descriptions of his search for the girls,
the narrator explains,
He glances at the wall of objects again, to make sure. The air around the plastic horse seems to
twitch and shiver. One of the girls’ names reads more clearly than the rest. Practically glowing.
She’ll be waiting for him. Out there.45
Early in the novel, the house reveals the objects that will orchestrate his moves through time,
providing purpose and intensity to an otherwise lost life. Wounded, weak, and disoriented,
Harper finds these objects and stares at them as they
pulse and flicker … It is as if he has spent his entire life in a drunken blur, but now the veil has
been whipped away. It is the moment of pure clarity, like fucking, or the instant he opened up
Jimmy Grebe’s throat. Like Dancing in irradiated paint.46
The house, the flicking objects, and the quest to kill the shining girls provide Harper a per-
verse counternarrative enabling him to emerge as a provisional subject of history, a man
formed both by the violence of the First World War and the precarity of the Great Depression.
Beukes, Shining Girls, 48.

45
46
Ibid., 37; emphasis in original.
266 A. SPAIN
Prior to Harper’s attempt to suture his failed life with his fantasy of being a subject who
answers to a mystical, authentic call from beyond the social, Beukes strongly suggests that
he should be read as one of the era’s “forgotten men.”47 At the beginning of the novel we find
Harper out of work and living in the “abode of forgotten men” in 1931, surely an allusion
to a musical number in Busby Berkeley’s Gold Diggers of 1933. Berkeley’s film culminates
in the angry and overwrought number, “My Forgotten Men,” that depicts First World War
veterans standing in breadlines, out of work, and without dignity or recognition. The dirty,
slumped, and humiliated men present a stark contrast to the film’s protagonists, Berkeley’s
shining chorus girls, literally draped in gold, covered in coins, singing “We’re In the Money”
while their faces are cinematically shot out of cannons to explode in big-screen light for
the amazed audience. The film’s shining girls perform in a musical within the musical, one
that presumes to restore and highlight the dignity of working men otherwise eclipsed from
history, something of a flashy urban entertainment version of James Agee’s documentation
of the working poor in his Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941). However, the irony of the
film and the brilliance of Beukes’ allusion is that it continues the men’s erasure; the structure
of Gold Digger’s overall narrative resolves itself only by the forgotten men’s exclusion. The
girls’ show is threatened to be canceled for lack of funding, and although the girls believe
they are to be saved by a penniless piano player-become-juvenile-lead in the show, played
by Dick Powell, he is slowly revealed to be the son of a wealthy family. In a sense, then,
there is no way narratively for the forgotten men to appear; if he were as poor as he first
seemed to the girls, the show would have failed. The men are again forgotten except as a
backdrop for the final number.
Harper himself could be exactly one of the extras in that final number, a veteran and an
injured man put upon by the circumstances of the depression and regularly chased off the
street by the cops. Rather than famous, his character registers something like Foucault’s
“infamous men” in “the dramaturgy of the real,” who only make an appearance in history
due to the chance culmination of their misfortune, institutional discipline, and the doc-
umentation of “an encounter with power.”48 Significantly, Harper emerges out of Beukes’
research on true crime, through fragments from newspapers, scraps of stories, psychiatric
records, documentation of complaints, and police reports, all of which, as Foucault writes,
take “part in the miniscule history of these existences, of their misfortune, of their rage or
of their uncertain madness.”49 This miniscule history, in Beukes’ hands, not only charts the
infamous lives-as-infrastructure of a Chicago Depression-era cityscape; as a time-traveler,
Harper jumps to the 1980s and early 1990s charting various historical palimpsests of the
city’s forgotten men and women, whose lives are only registered as single lines from a
47
Berkley’s “forgotten men” come directly from Franklin Roosevelt’s “Forgotten Man” speech of 1932, where he declares: “These
unhappy times call for the building of plans that rest upon the forgotten, the unorganized but the indispensable units of
economic power, for plans like those of 1917 that build from the bottom up and not from the top down, that put their faith
once more in the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid,” Roosevelt, “The Forgotten Man Speech,” 624.
Interestingly, Jefferson Cowie points out that Roosevelt and his speech writers had lifted the phrase “the forgotten man”
from late nineteenth-century social Darwinist William Graham Sumner, who figured the forgotten man as an over-reacher
held down by “the poor, the state, or the do-gooder who tried to mobilize both,” Cowie, The Great Exception, 92. For Cowie,
this is an important connection, as it points to central difference in how disenfranchisement might be figured for “forgotten
men and women.” On the right, it is the productive man who is held down by the shiftless poor, while on the left, it is bad
capitalist policy not moral weakness that creates the poor. Berkley himself never quite resolves this contradiction and in
some sense elides it by identifying the forgotten man with the brave First World War veteran, but giving the heroic role to
Dick Powell, the scion of a wealthy family.
48
Foucault, “The Lives of Infamous Men,” 78.
49
Ibid.
courthouse document or as a newspaper headline. For example, until Beukes’ imaginative

retelling, the true-to-life version of the impoverished musical show girl who “shines” does
so not in the three-point light of Hollywood that inevitably illuminates the talent of a Ginger
Rogers, but because she dances in radium paint: Beukes’ 1931 Sun Times headline reads,
“Glow Girl Caught in Death’s Dance.”50
Significantly, Harper marks his exploits in conjunction with very particular dynamics
of time and history. He can travel through time, but he can neither travel beyond 1993
nor before 1929. The dates here are important, as the promise of Chicago as a modern
American city was that of being able to provide a stable domestic life for ordinary (white)
workers. Between the end of the First World War and the crash of 1929, Chicago largely
lived up to that promise, building whole neighborhoods of one- and two-family homes for
its working classes. Even as “the house” signified the promise of secure domestic life and
one’s thriving position within a global economy, it also stood as a continual demand on
white working-class men and became a measure of their masculinity. Despite later economic
recoveries, such as the productive surge of the Second World War and the prosperity of
postwar years, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, white working-class men would have to
compete against women and people of color fully entering the workforce. Throughout the
1980s and 1990s, Irish and Polish neighborhoods on the Southwest side of Chicago were
transformed as new immigrants from Central America and Mexico transformed the city.
The Shining Girls’s narrative of time travel becomes key to charting the infrastructural
realities of class antagonisms and cultural imaginaries that produce hostility and solidify
divisions between working people. Except for Harper’s first murder, the subsequent mur-
ders in The Shining Girls are rarely senseless killings. The psychotic violence is never mere
outburst, for it must be made to signify, and consistent with the serial-killer genre, Beukes’
killers are obsessed with how the victims’ bodies become texts, overwritten by the killers’
own fantasies. Beukes weaves together Harper’s killings with the objects he leaves with the
victims, and those he takes from them. Though illegible to Harper himself, who has little
idea of why he is doing what he does other than a vague idea of “satisfying the house,” the
killings all speak to his fantasy of disenfranchisement. One of the killings that most clearly
demonstrates this is that of Zora, a young African-American woman whom Harper first
meets on 2 January 1932. This meeting is crucial, for it happens early in the book, and Zora
is a teenager: “On the way home, he comes across a young colored girl and is hit with the
unmistakable lightning jolt of recognition and inevitability.”51 The two have a brief exchange,
filled with both racial and gendered threat. Walking back to the house, Harper is thrown
into such a state of distraction that he does not enter his present in 1932, but instead leaps
to an earlier entry into the house:
But his head is so full of her, Zora-Zora-Zora-Zora, that he makes a mistake and opens the
House to find the goddamn corpse [of his third murder victim, the former owner of the house,
Bartek] back in the hallway, the blood wet on the floorboards and the turkey still frozen. He
stares at it, shocked. And then ducks back over the threshold, under the wooden X of the
planks and pulls the door shut.52
50
See the acknowledgments page at the end of The Shining Girls, 388. Beukes references the real radium glow girl dancer,
New York show girl Jeanette Klara, and her source, a 1935 Milwaukee Journal article about Klara by Paul Harrison.
51
Ibid., 87.
52
Beukes, The Shining Girls, 92.
268 A. SPAIN
Generally, Harper has conscious control of his movement through time, but seeing Zora
and caught up in her shining and the potential he sees in her, he is thrown back into his
weakest, most vulnerable state. His encounter with the shining girl is closely connected
with where he finds himself in time.
Like the other victims, Zora is given an entire chapter, this time focusing on her in life
and death in January of 1943, at the height of the industrial war effort. Zora’s husband has
already died in the war; she survives him to raise their four children alone. Her husband’s
body has been taken up by the war effort, just as the city is beginning to take up any body
in its industrial infrastructure, given their paradoxical “indispensability and expendability;”
white women, people of color, and women of color become indispensable (yet replaceable)
labor for the industrial war effort.53 Zora has gone to work for the Chicago Bridge & Iron
Company, whose workers are producing the massive landing craft that will carry soldiers
and tanks on the beaches of France on D-Day.54 However, working in the war effort as a
well-paid welder, Zora is exceptional. As the narrator explains,
The shipyard operates twenty-four hours a day, clanking, grinding industry, pushing out
Landing Ship Tanks as fast as they can make them. They work straight throughout the night:
men and women, Greeks and Poles and Irish, but no other Negroes. Jim Crow is still alive
and well in Seneca.55
The narrative clearly emphasizes that Zora, following Zora Neale Hurston, is both excep-
tional and speaks to the ordinary, breaking not only the boundary of gender, but also that
of race. Given the location of the factory on the Chicago River, just outside Chicago, the
narrator explains why Zora must live in an old and isolated farmhouse: “it means there is
no official housing for coloreds, let alone colored families, and she rents a small house, two
rooms with an outside latrine, on a farm three miles away.”56 Her work building the huge
iron ships in the factory, shows how the rapid industrialization of the war is starting to
affect race relations. Practicing the highly skilled trade of welding, working in “thick men’s
overalls” with “a mask that protects her face,”57 Zora has taken a place that, in the past, would
have been available only to white men. Where the uniform and the tools of the occupation
hide her skin color and gender, one of the most violent aspects of Harper’s murder is how
cruelly he makes sure she is again marked racially.
Harper returns to 1943 to kill Zora. He finds her when she is returning home from the
third shift, just before dawn. She has walked away from the factory, toward her isolated
farm house, and Harper catches her out in the open country. As she is walking, she crosses
the railroad tracks that lead to her thoughts about how the city’s industrial infrastructure
introduced vectors of movement that would profoundly affect race relations:
her boots crunch on the gravel as she steps over the thick sleepers of the Rock Island that
helped civilize the West, carrying hope in every railcar packed with migrants, white, Mexican,
Chinese, but especially black folk. You wanted to get the hell out of the South, you hopped on a
train for Charm City and the jobs advertised in the Chicago Defender, or sometimes, as in her
daddy’s case, at the Defender, working as a linotype operator for thirty-six years. The railroad
brings in prefabricated parts now. And her daddy’s been in the ground for long years already.58
53
Mbembe, “The Aesthetics of Superfluity,” 68.
54
Note the resonance with Clayton Broom’s employment in military industrial production in 1990s Detroit in Broken Monsters.
55
56
Ibid., 106.
57
Ibid., 108.
58
Ibid., 110.
Harper barely manages to kill Zora and is himself severely wounded in the encounter. Strong
from her work as a welder, she dislocates his jaw before he manages a fatal wound with his
knife. Accounting for this, the narrator states, “Zora might be built like a wrestler, but she
has never been in the ring,”59 suggesting forcefully her potential to become the equal of a
man like Harper in every way but for her socialization.
It is not without irony that Beukes writes Zora’s murder and disappearance into what
would have been Richard Wright’s “backyard.” The publication of Wright’s famous 1937
review of Their Eyes were Watching God, entitled “Between Laughter and Tears,” has been
heralded by many as the death knell of Hurston’s potential literary success as a writer of
the Harlem Renaissance. Echoing Wallace Thurman’s fictional dramatization of Hurston,
Sweetie May Carr in Infants of Spring (1932) that “depicts Hurston as a writer only interested
in reaping rewards from white patrons,”60 Wright famously reduced Hurston’s writing to
minstrelsy:
Miss Hurston can write, but her prose is cloaked in that facile sensuality that has dogged Negro
expression since the days of Phillis Wheatley. Her dialogue manages to catch the psychological
movements of the Negro folk-mind in their pure simplicity, but that’s as far as it goes. … Miss
Hurston voluntarily continues in her novel the tradition which was forced upon the Negro in
the theatre, that is, the minstrel technique that makes the “white folks” laugh. Her characters
eat and laugh and cry and work and kill; they swing like a pendulum eternally in that safe
and narrow orbit in which America likes to see the Negro live: between laughter and tears.61
Langston Hughes’ characterization of Hurston both in person and in her writing echoes
these sentiments in his autobiography, The Big Sea (1945). Calling Hurston’s persona “a
perfect book in and of herself,” whose performances were pitched to “wealthy whites, some
of whom simply paid her just to sit around and represent the negro race for them,” Hughes
believed her writing only served to reach a wider audience.62 Hurston disappeared from the
scene of American letters as a result of these disparaging attitudes by the heavyweight male
writers of the day, and her disappearance might have remained complete had Alice Walker
not searched for her grave in 1973 following in the footsteps of Mary Helen Washington’s
1972 essay, “The Black Woman’s Search for Identity: Zora Neale Hurston’s Work,” which
appeared in the August issue of Black World.
In The Shining Girls, Beukes writes Zora’s disappearance in Wright’s Chicago, and the
year of her murder indexes Hurston’s literary disappearance. Zora’s presence and murder
in the novel signal the historical and material presence of women of color as historical
agents of integration and social justice in the US, while demonstrating their forcible era-
sure, whether from the literary canon or historical accounts. For example, Zora’s murder is
underscored by two objects: a Jackie Robinson baseball card and lead type letter “Z” from
a printing press. Harper’s choice was to leave a Jackie Robinson baseball card as his object
to mark Zora’s killing. The anachronism of the card will become a significant clue for Kirby,
for Robinson would not break the color barrier in Major League Baseball until 1947, two
years after Zora Neale Hurston’s and Zora-the-character’s “disappearance.” As a key figure
in the history of the American civil rights movement, Robinson broke through segregation
of Major League Baseball, enabling new national imaginaries of racial inclusion. Ultimately,
59
Ibid., 112.
60
“Separating the Dancer and the Dance.”
61
Wright, “Between Laughter and Tears,” 25.
62
Quoted in “Separating the Dancer and the Dance.”
270 A. SPAIN
however, as with the Harlem Renaissance writers, within these imaginaries only men were
rendered visible. Nevertheless, Beukes depicts Zora as a figure who breaks both the color
bar and that of gender, resonant with Robinson’s significance, even if unrepresented in his-
tory. Similar to Robinson, Zora’s work in the plant was not met with civility by most of her
co-workers: “Dirty looks and ugly words slide right off ” Zora, the narrator tells us.63 In his
early days in the major league, Robinson, too, would play games to storms of abuse hurled
at him from the stands. In one of the most famous of these early incidents, Robinson recalls
white fans in Louisville, Kentucky as a “vicious … howling mob.”64 Robinson continues,
“I had been booed pretty soundly before, but nothing like this. A torrent of mass hatred
burst from the stands with virtually every move I made.”65 Robinson represented not just
the game of baseball but also its stands, its commodities, its aura of professionalism and
patriotism, and its totality deployed as an allegory for the nation. For Robinson to wear the
uniform of a major league team was to change what was imaginable for the nation itself.
Like Zora, Robinson was noted for not letting the insults bother him, focusing on work.
The card Harper leaves initially comes from shining girl Jin-Sook, herself an embodiment
of the racial transformation put in motion by figures including Robinson but also everyday
people that Zora represents. Jin-Sook studies sociology and ignores her mother’s advice to
simply marry “a doctor or a lawyer,”66 and instead she eventually becomes “a caseworker
for the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) in one of the city’s most notorious housing
projects;”67 Jin-Sook works to further social justice initiated by those who would usher in
the civil rights movement.
Harper not only leaves the Robinson card with Zora, he also takes from her a remarka-
ble object, the lead-type letter “Z.” Her father worked as a printer with the world’s premier
black newspaper, The Chicago Defender, and he had given the letter to Zora when she was
a young girl. Harper trades the Robinson card for
the metal Cooper Black letter “Z” from an old printer tray she carried around like a talisman,
that her daddy brought home for her from his work at the Defender. “Fighting the good fight,”
he’s told the kids, dropping a letter for each of them, stamped with Barnhart Brothers & Spindler
at the bottom, Defunct now. “But you can’t stop progress” her daddy had said.68
Harper takes her life and the talisman of “the good fight” which is epitomized by the dignity
of work on the one hand, and the ironic obsolescence of both labor and things, on the other,
as “progress” renders each “defunct.” Zora’s murder thus brings together a series of objects
that all point to the ways that individual lives are caught up in (and as) the vast material
infrastructure that make everyday lives of the city and the nation: the railroad, vast industrial
factories, literary presses, and baseball. The Jackie Robinson card evokes not only the game
but also the built spaces of stadiums and the circulation of mass-produced commodities
like trading cards, all evoking the assemblage of a US imaginary in which “the game” evokes
leisure, family, and belonging on the one hand and an escape from the mechanisms of labor
on the other. It is traded for the single piece of type that connects Zora personally to the
history of industrialization, work, and the vast struggle over cultural representation that
63
64
See Rampersad, Jackie Robinson, 156.
65
Ibid.
66
67
Ibid.
68
Ibid., 113.
would span the twentieth century, including women’s erasure within it. While the Chicago
Defender took little notice of Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes’ conversations about
race with his fictional Jesse B. Semple first appeared in his weekly column in the Defender
in 1943, the date of “Zora’s” murder in the novel.69
These struggles for gendered agency within the Harlem Renaissance and racial inclu-
sion within larger national imaginaries become the backdrop to Harper’s sense of disen-
franchisement and emasculation, both of which are heightened due to his anxiety about
race. In 1943, the United States had its industrial capacity fully developed, and there was
full employment, both within the armed forces, but even more so in the vast civilian and
industrial development that supported the war effort. As a white man, Harper would have
had no trouble in finding not just a job, but well-paid work in 1943, even with his age and
his disability. In other words, had he chosen to stay in 1943, he might embrace his ability
to time travel and the freedom his white privilege might have engendered.70 However, his
attachment to the house, the site of his break from the social and his erotic attachment to
the murders that fill the void of his impotence, maintains the strongest hold over him: in the
first years of the Depression, “He’d been up and down the whole goddamn country, chasing
after the work like a bitch in heat. Until he found the House.”71 Once he finds the House,
he becomes attached: “the house has been waiting for him. It called him for a purpose. The
voice in his head is whispering home.”72
Harper’s attachment to the early 1930s is significant for both the US and the South African
contexts. The Great Depression begins with the collapse of the US stock market, and the
ripples of this crash spread out across the world, throwing millions into poverty. Indeed,
1931–1932 would be the worst years of the depression in both the US and South Africa. In
the US, “the depression grew almost worse by the day in 1932,” due in large part to President
Hoover’s refusal to engage in any economic stimulus or relief programs.73 In his sweeping
accounts of the South African white working class, Robert Davies notes that just as in the
United States, the year 1932 stands out: “For the worst depression years 1932 and 1933 the
Department [of Labor] calculated that there were 17 and 31 [white] unemployed males per
1,000.”74 The effects of the Depression were widespread not only for white men, but also
for all the peoples of South Africa, but the government response to those years fostered the
forces of apartheid. As Davies concludes, “The real solution to white unemployment was
found in a combination of colour bars, high minimum wages and industrial development.”75
Davies emphasizes that the growing color bars were intentionally directed at shattering any
69
This reading is indebted to Ted Atkinson, who pointed me to Richard Wright’s Chicago as the site of Zora Neale Hurston’s
erasure.
70
August of 1943 saw incidents of looting in Harlem, NY, and on Hasting Street in Detroit, as African Americans protested the
color bar limiting employment opportunities in shops and as trades people in their own neighborhoods. Hughes wrote a
series of “Letters to White Shopkeepers” that underscore collective frustration at the ease with which white workers, even
those just arrived from Europe, could find employment. For example, Hughes explains, “When a newly arrived employee
from Europe comes in and starts ringing up the cash register before he can even count in English, that makes us mad.” See
Langston Hughes and the Chicago Defender, 100.
71
Ibid., 3.
72
Ibid., 34.
73
McElvaine, The Great Depression, 51.
74
Davies, “The White Working Class in South Africa,” 47. Given a total white South African population of 1.8 million in 1930, the
white unemployment statistics are significant. In his comprehensive account of those years in Capital, State, and White
Labor in South Africa: 1900–1960, Davies writes that “the official statistics, which of course cover only a portion of the
total, show the numbers of whites officially registering unemployed rising rapidly throughout 1932 and 1933 to a peak of
39,309 (adult white males only) in October 1933.”
75
Davies, “The White Working Class in South Africa,” 47.
272 A. SPAIN
possibility of solidarity between black and white workers, and concludes that those with the
means of production used color to foreclose any solidarity between white and black working
classes, essentially buying off South Africa’s white working class by “participat[ing] in the
exploitation of the majority of the working class.”76 By contrast, although white workers made
up the majority of the US proletariat, and opportunities for African Americans represented
by figures like Zora signaled a move away from a segregated work force (rather than the
impetus for the continuation of it), in both contexts, black workers became the lightning
rod for ideological resentment and the displacement of economic and social frustration.
Even as Harper might embrace Chicago’s eras of prosperity rather than dwelling on
people whom he fantasmatically perceives as competition and threat to his own well-
being, significantly he always returns to the early Depression, for without it, his narrative
of exceptionalism would no longer hold. In one of the most cinematic descriptions of the
novel, Beukes draws the moment in which Harper realizes that the house is fantastically
moving through time: “He squints against the sudden brightness outside and watches it
change to thick rolling clouds and silvered dashes of rain, then to a red-streaked sunset,
like a cheap zoetrope.”77 It is as though Harper has stepped through one of Clayton’s chalk-
drawn doors into another world. Though Harper is overwhelmed by this and tries to shut
the curtains, in a glimpse he sees the house rolling through time:
The houses across the way change. The paint strips away, recolors itself, strips away again
through snow and sun and trash tangled with leaves blowing down the street. Windows are
broken, boarded over, spruced up with a vase of flowers that turn brown and fall away. The
empty lot becomes overgrown, fills over with cement, grass grows through the cracks in wild
tufts, rubbish congeals, the rubbish is removed, it comes back, along with aggressive snarls of
writing on the walls in vicious colors.78
Harper is overwhelmed and disturbed by this headlong rush through time, and yet in the
fantastic narrative, even Harper suspects that it must have the potential dimension of some
radical freedom. Realizing that the house allows him to travel through time, Harper finally
crosses the threshold out of his present: “the door swings open on to a flash of light, sharp
as a firecracker in a dark cellar, ripping through the intestines of a cat.”79 Beukes writes the
leap from one historical present to another with a violent noise, the ripping through a body,
and a breaking through. When Harper steps through the door, he really is somewhere else
in time. As he marvels at the change in the world on this first leap into another time, he is
also thinking about how he can remain grounded and untouched by it: “He fingers the key
in his pocket. His way back. If he wants to go.”80 The “if ” is crucial, for it shows that Harper
could choose to leave the house and cease his violent quest. He could let the movement of
time transform him into something else in some elsewhere, but he refuses this gift. Instead,
he remains fatally attached, holding on to the key, to the way back to 1931, the time and
the place to which he will always return. Harper remains attached to a fantasy of his own
disenfranchisement and his violent overcoming of it.
76
Ibid., 49. Davies writes, “But if some indication of the detachment of white workers from the bulk of the South African
proletariat, and their alliance with the settler bourgeoisie, emerges from our analysis of unemployment and job-status, the
conclusive evidence of their present politico-economic position lies in their peculiar income situation. For it is clear that a
section of the labour-force will tend to become most fully tied to the bourgeoisie when it benefits from the extraction of
surplus value, in other words when it participates in the exploitation of the majority of the working class.”
77
Beukes, Shining Girls, 35.
78
Ibid., 36.
79
Ibid.
80
Ibid.
Infamous lives
Harper and Clayton might both be read as the dramatization of men whose only record of
existence is the documentation of their violence, whether they were marked as petty crimi-
nals or violent offenders; the only indexes of their lives exist in mugshots, as crime statistics,
and as stories of sensational murders now archived in microfilm.81 Kirby becomes immersed
in these files, looking for the contingent flash of the gray grid of discursive documentation
that might reveal Harper’s identity. In a recent interview, Beukes describes her research on
serial killers and true crime, stating that
the most devastating part of writing the book [was] having to delve into these people’s heads.
There’s not a lot going on in there, they generally don’t have a lot of empathy, obviously, but
they also don’t have a lot of insight into why they’re doing what they’re doing. A lot of them
have major issues with impotence in the world, whether that’s actual sexual dysfunction or
feelings of powerlessness. They’re actually just violent losers, and that’s not as interesting as
Hannibal [from Thomas Harris’ Silence of the Lambs].82
Harper and Clayton might be read as fictive enunciations of the lives of infamous men from
Chicago’s and Detroit’s pockets of the impoverished, those “made miserable by urban life,”83
whose exploits, by chance, have been registered in the banal, “gray grid of administration.”84
For Foucault, literature after the seventeenth century becomes a part of a “great system of
constraint” that “compelled the everyday to bring itself into discourse:”
In the nets of power, along fairly complex circuits, came to be caught the disputes between
neighbours, the quarrels between parents and children, the domestic misunderstandings, the
excesses of wine and sex, the public bickerings and many secret passions. It was as though what
happened was an immense and omnipresent summons for the bringing of all these agitations
and of each of these little sufferings into discourse. A murmuring that shall know no bounds
begins to swell: the one through which the individual variations in conduct, the disgraces and
the secrets are offered up through discourse to the clasp of power. The trivial ceases to belong
to silence, to passing rumor or to fleeting avowel. All those things which make up the ordinary,
the unimportant detail, the obscurity, the days without glory, the common life, … have become
describable and transcribable.85
These murmurings, perhaps something like the currents underneath the world in Broken
Monsters and the desire of the house in The Shining Girls, stand in stark contrast to the
promise of the rust belt’s American Dream. It is through the chance moment of the docu-
mentation of lives in a “collision with power” that, according to Foucault,
allows these absolutely inglorious people … to still manifest their rage, their affliction or their
invincible obstinacy of divagation, [which] perhaps compensates for the misfortune which had
brought down on them, despite their modesty and anonymity, the lightning flash of power.86
In other words, for Foucault, there is a “revenge” against power in this strange provi-
sional moment when “infamous men” are incited to speak about their actions, and the
81
While writing the novel, Beukes constructed a murder wall, with photographs of the objects structuring the
novel, but also with newspaper clippings, reproductions from microfilm, and diagrams of neighborhoods detail-
ing both historical and fictional crimes. For a good reproduction of the murder wall, see Tom Cheshire’s interview
and review entitled, “String Theory: Lauren Beukes Plots her Time-traveling Murder Mystery” in Wired. May 14, 2013,
http://www.wired.co.uk/article/string-theory.
82
Beukes, Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy.
83
Simone, “People as Infrastructure,” 68.
84
Foucault, “The Lives of Infamous Men,” 87.
85
Ibid., 86.
86
Ibid., 81.
274 A. SPAIN
documentation of the utterance can be read as a trace of the misfortunes power heaps onto
those lives. Foucault reads these documents as indexes of the “most intense points of lives”87
where individuals clash with power and yet illustrate attempts to evade its mechanisms. If
read thus, the indexes make visible the violence done to these men which precipitates their
own violent acting out.
The novels strongly suggest that the promise of working-class white reproductive futurity
ends with a series of crashes, creating an unresolved subjective experience of an intolerable
reality within global capital. Slavoj Žižek observes that, “Even the most brutal violence is
the enacting of a certain symbolic deadlock.”88 Clayton’s and Harper’s sustained outbursts
of psychotic violence, and the particular form it takes – the aestheticization of violence on
the one hand, and, on the other hand, the killing of girls who, as they reach adulthood, are
more capable and filled with more potential and “shine” than either could ever secure on
the other – fulfill a kind of perverse logic of “our” culture. Žižek argues that “the lessons of
the post-9/11 world are that the Francis Fukuyama dream of global liberal democracy is
at an end and that, at the level of the world economy, corporate capitalism has triumphed
worldwide.”89 Therefore, the paranoiac violence travels through time and space, between
centuries and continents. Speaking of the serial killings of women in Ciudad Juarez between
1993 and 2005, Žižek’s analysis resonates in an uncanny way with my readings of the serial
killings depicted in the Shining Girls. The killings are not, he argues,
… just private pathologies, but a ritualized activity, part of [a] subculture [that directs its para-
noiac violence] at single young women working in new assembling factories … And the crucial
feature in all these cases is that the criminally violent act is not a spontaneous outburst of raw
brutal energy which breaks the chains of civilized customs, but something learned, externally
imposed, ritualized and part of the collective symbolic substance of a community. What is
repressed for the “innocent” public gaze is not the cruel brutality of the act, but precisely its
“cultural,” ritualistic character as symbolic custom.90
It is easy to dismiss Clayton and Harper as emblematic of private pathologies, “violent
losers,” and terrifying examples of US racism and misogyny. However, Beukes’ work gives
a form for this cultural, fascistic unconscious to vent, and the novels might also give form
to “our” – or her readers’ – desire to see it. In other words, these contemporary depictions
of serial killers so resonant with those in television, film, and especially Netflix serials
might just be an enactment of a new form, a collective ritual of symbolic violence and the
creation of new heroes that might emerge to combat it. The particular form the ritual takes
in Beukes’ novels is that of the venting of a white masculinist unconscious in the face of
global capital’s failure to reproduce the good life. That unconscious displaces what is read
as personal failure onto those deemed threatening: women, people of color, the poor, and
every form of “utilitarian … cowardice.”91 The novels dramatize a symbolic deadlock within
the real that prompts the paranoid fantasies of the racist and the misogynist. In this, if she is
indeed again writing about Johannesburg through “America,” Beukes might be writing the
classed desperation and anxieties not only of the US 1930s white working class, but those
of the 1930s Afrikaner, and contemporary white supremicists looking for a fantasy that will
87
Ibid., 80.
88
Žižek, Pervert’s Guide.
89
Žižek, “In the Wake of Paris Attacks.”
90
Ibid., emphasis added.
91
both justify and support the violent drive and enjoyment of the homosocial violence seeking
both its apocalyptic narrative fantasy and its outlet.
Read as cautionary tales for “our” present, Beukes’ novels thus capture the texture of the
violence of the “majority”(meaning, following Jean-Francois Lyotard, the ones who wield
the greatest fear, not who have the greatest number92), in which subjects formerly holding
a more secure position in the “center” are confronted with the irrational and violent forces
of global capitalism. Unable to grasp or articulate the hopeless position that has been cre-
ated for them, “the forgotten men” fill the gap with declarations of populism in which the
monsters are the women or the people of color deemed to make the nation weak (even
as they are building it): “Make America Great Again,” “Rhodesia First, Last and Always,”
#RedOctober.
This article was first composed prior to the November 2016 election and before the Trump
campaign deployed the trope of the “forgotten men.” Immediately after his victory, Donald
will never be forgotten again. We will all come together as never before.”93 Following Steve
Bannon, Trump invoked the “forgotten man” popularized by Roosevelt and imagined so
spectacularly by Berkeley’s film. However, Bannon’s documentaries, his ties to Breitbart’s
white nationalism, and the speeches he has written for Trump return to the earlier sense of
an aggrieved forgotten man swamped by the morally degenerate poor. An echo of Sumner’s
nineteenth-century social Darwinism becomes the heart of Trump’s inaugural address,
co-written by Bannon. As Jefferson Cowie writes, Sumner wrote about a “forgotten man”
who wanted nothing more than “freedom from the interventionist state and the nagging
concerns of the undeserving poor.”94 In his inaugural address, Trump states that “The wealth
of our middle class has been ripped from their homes and then redistributed across the
entire world,”95 and for Trump, as for Sumner, this is the “forgotten man” he addresses. He
then suggests that
January 20th 2017, will be remembered as the day the people became the rulers of this nation
again. The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer. Everyone is
listening to you now. You came by the tens of millions to become part of a historic movement
the likes of which the world has never seen before.96
With the election of Donald Trump, the conduit for the circulation of white supremacy
between the US and South Africa has again been formalized. One has only to point to
Trump’s invitation of South African singer Stephen Hofmeyr to attend the 2017 inaugu-
ration. A crusader of “the plights of whites,” Hofmeyr regularly circulates propaganda of
so-called “white genocide in the New South Africa.” However, the pre-Trump resurgence
of US white supremicists’ fetishization of South African and Rhodesian white nationalism
92
See Lyotard, Just Gaming.
93
Trump, “Such a Beautiful and Important Evening!”
94
Cowie, The Great Exception, 92.
95
While this essay emphasizes the plight of the white, masculinist working class unconscious of Beukes’ killers, the success
of the Trump campaign in part was its ability prompt a middle-class and upper middle-class over-identification with a
romanticized white working-class America. Ratcheting up white fears, particularly the fear that wealthy whites and their
children will be unable to reproduce their class position in the face of globalization, obfuscated actual material differences
between white Trump supporters, thus enabling middle- and upper middle-class voters to imagine themselves, too, as
forgotten men and women despite their obvious wealth.
96
Trump, “The Inagural Address.”
276 A. SPAIN
can be seen much earlier and might be epitomized by the figure of Dylann Roof. Perhaps
the quintessential “forgotten man,” Roof can be seen as the embodiment of contemporary
US racism and a profound agent of its paranoiac violence.97 Citing South African apart-
heid as the model that should inspire the US South, Roof argued that the minority whites
could again rule “the Negroes” who are “taking over the country.”98 On his website, Roof
included photos revealing his fetishization of South African and Rhodesian colonial white
nationalism, demonstrating that both served as symbolic inspiration and, unsettlingly, have
become the new symbols of contemporary white supremacy. Significantly, Roof had sown
apartheid-era flags onto his jacket, symbols that, like the Odal rune, have taken the place
of the swastika for US white nationalists’ new mainstream presence.
As writers like Beukes remind us, we have in fact seen this frightening vision before,
across the world, and, for those listening closely, rustling in the aggrieved characters of
Broken Monsters and The Shining Girls. Thankfully, however, Beukes’ girls do shine, which
is to say, they can see the ghosts of the past shimmering in the present, the infrastructural
palimpsest of violence, and confront its displacements and substitutions: in the words of
Scatman Crothers’ character Dick Hallorann in the film The Shining, “you do run across
them. A lot of folks, they got a bit of shine to them. They don’t even know it.”99
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Andrea Spain teaches postcolonial literature and critical theory at Mississippi State University. Her
essays have appeared in Modern Fiction Studies, Safundi, Trickhouse, and Bombay Gin.
References
Beukes, Lauren. Broken Monsters. New York: Harper, 2015.
Beukes, Lauren. “G’bye America and Thanks for all the Fish. I’m Leaving with a TV Deal for Broken
Monsters in the Works and a Freaking Suitcase Full of Book.” September 25, 2014, 11:05am UTC.
Tweet. https://twitter.com/laurenbeukes/status/515094690090459136.
Beukes, Lauren. Interview by John Joseph Adams and David Barr Kirtley, Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy
Podcast, 89, June 29, 2013, https://geeksguideshow.com/2013/06/20/ggg89-lauren-beukes/.
Beukes, Lauren. The Shining Girls. New York: Mulholland/Little Brown, 2014.
Blum, Cinzia Sartini. The Other Modernism: FT Marinetti’s Futurist Fiction of Power. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1996.
97
Roof massacred six women and three men at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal church located in downtown
Charleston in 2015. In the manifesto attributed to Roof and published on his website, “thelastrhodesian.com” (now defunct),
the author writes, “I chose Charleston because it is the most historic city in my state, and at one time had the highest ratio
of blacks to Whites in the country. We have no skinheads, no real KKK, no one doing anything but talking on the internet.
Well someone has to have the bravery to take it to the real wold, and I guess that has to be me.” My thanks to Shane Graham
for the chilling observation that I might make the link between Roof and the “forgotten men” of this essay. See Roof, “The
Last Rhodesian Manefesto,” 2.
98
Ibid., 1.
99
Kubrick, The Shining.
Comaroff, Jean. “The Uses of ‘Ex-centricity’: Cool Reflections from Hot Places.” Johannesburg
Workshop in Criticism and Theory 3 (2010). jwtc.org.za/volume_3/jean_comaroff.htm.
Cowie, Jefferson. The Great Exception: The New Deal and the Limits of American Politics. Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016.
Davies, Robert H. Capital, State, and White Labour in South Africa, 1900–1960: An Historical
Materialist Analysis of Class Formation and Class Relations, Vol 2. Brighton: Harvester Press, 1979.
Davies, Robert H. “The White Working-Class in South Africa.” New Left Review 82 (1973): 40–59.
Deadline Team. “‘Broken Monsters’ Acquired By Endemol’s Additional Dialogue For Drama Series.”
Deadline, January 22, 2015. http://deadline.com/2015/01/broken-monsters-tv-series-endemol-
additional-dialogue-1201355261/.
Dickson, Jessica. “Reading the (Zoo) City: The Social Realities and Science Fiction of Johannesburg.”
Johannesburg Workshop in Criticism and Theory 7 (2014): 67–78. http://www.jwtc.org.za/resources/
docs/salon-volume-7/14_TheSalon_Vol7.pdf.
Foucault, Michel. “The Lives of Infamous Men.” In Michel Foucault: Power, Truth, Strategy, ed.
Meaghan Morris and Paul Patton, 71–91. Sydney: Feral Publications, 1979.
Frenkel, Ronit. “Lauren Beukes and the Monsters of World Literature; or What a South African Lens
Offers in Understanding America.” African Futures and Beyond: Visions in Transition. African
Literature Association Conference, University of Bayreuth. Bayreuth, Germany, June 4, 2015.
Graham, Shane. “The Entropy of Built Things: Postapartheid Anxiety and the Production of Space
in Henrietta Rose-Innes’ Nineveh and Lauren Beukes’ Zoo City.” Safundi 16, no. 1 (2015): 64–77.
Hoad, Neville. “Dystopian Futures, Apartheid, and Postapartheid Allegories: Contemporary
Imaginings of Johannesburg.” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 36,
no. 2 (2016): 293–306.
Hughes, Langston. Langston Hughes and the Chicago Defender: Essays on Race, Politics and Culture,
1942–62. Ed. Christopher C. De Santis. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1995.
Ialongo, Ernest. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti: The Artist and His Politics. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield,
2015.
Gold Diggers of 1933. Dir. Mervyn LeRoy and Busby Berkeley. Perf. Warren William, Joan Blondell,
Aline MacMahon, Ruby Keeler, Dick Powell, and Ginger Rogers. Warner Bros., 1933.
King, Stephen. The Shining. New York: Anchor Reprints, 2013.
Lyotard, Jean-François and Jean-Loup Thébald. Just Gaming. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1985.
Marinetti, F. T. “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism.” In Futurism: An Anthology, ed. Lawrence
Rainey, Christine Poggi, and Laura Wittman, 49–53. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009.
Mbembe, Achille. “Aesthetics of Superfluity.” In Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis, ed. Achille
Mbembe and Sarah Nuttall, 37–67. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008.
McElvaine, Robert S. The Great Depression: America, 1929–1941. New York: Broadway Books, 1993.
Misra, Ria. “Lauren Beukes Explains How to Tell Great Stories About The Internet.” i09,
October 16, 2014. http://io9.gizmodo.com/lauren-beukes-explains-how-to-tell-great-stories-
about-1635505553.
Rampersad, Arnold. Jackie Robinson: A Biography. New York: Random House, 1998.
Roof, Dylann. “The Last Rhodesian Manifesto.” Document Cloud. June 6, 2015. http://www.
documentcloud.org/documents/2108059-lastrhodesian-manifesto.html.
Roosevelt, Franklin D. “128. The Forgotten Man Speech. Radio Address, Albany, N. Y. April 7, 1932.”
In The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt, ed. Samuel Irving Roseman, Vol. 1,
1928–32, 624–625. New York: Random House, 1938.
Schmidt, Jennifer M. “The Girls Who Don’t Die: Subversions of Gender and Genre in Recent Fiction
by Lauren Beukes.” Safundi 17, no. 2 (2016): 1–19.
“Separating the Dancer from the Dance: The Unearthing of Zora Neale Hurston.” Xroads: Digital
Archives of American Studies at UVA, 1995–2006. http://xroads.virginia.edu/~MA01/Grand-Jean/
Hurston/Chapters/mmintro.html.
The Shining. Directed by Stanley Kubric, Performers, Jack Nicholson, Shelley Duvall, Scatman
Crothers, and Danny Lloyd. Warner Bros., 1980. Film.
278 A. SPAIN
Simone, AbdouMaliq. “People as Infrastructure: Intersecting Fragments in Johannesburg.” In

Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis, ed. Sarah Nuttall and Achille Mbembe, 68–90. Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2008.
Trump, Donald. “Such a Beautiful and Important Evening! The Forgotten Man and Woman Will
Never be Forgotten Again. We Will all Come Together as Never Before.” November 2016, 3:36am
EST. Tweet.
Trump, Donald. The Inagural Address: Remarks of President Donald J. Trump – As Prepared for
Delivery. Washington, DC. January 20, 2017. https://www.whitehouse.gov/inaugural-address.
Wright, Richard. “Between Laughter and Tears.” New Masses, October 5, 1937.
Žižek, Slavoj. “In the Wake of Paris Attacks the Left Must Embrace Its Radical Western Roots.” In
These Times. November 16, 2015. http://inthesetimes.com/article/18605/breaking-the-taboos-in-
the-wake-of-paris-attacks-the-left-must-embrace-its.
Žižek, Slavoj. The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology. Directed by Sophie Fiennes. Zeitgeist, 2012. Film.

Shining Girls

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Shining Girls

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Safundi

The Journal of South African and American Studies

ISSN: 1753-3171 (Print) 1543-1304 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rsaf20

Shining girls and forgotten men in Lauren Beukes’

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/17533171.2017.1329855

Published online: 26 Jun 2017.

Submit your article to this journal

View related articles

View Crossmark data

Citing articles: 1 View citing articles

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

Shining girls and forgotten men in Lauren Beukes’ urban

CONTACT Andrea Spain ads506@msstate.edu @laurenbeukes

Mbembe, urban aesthetics of superfluity render visible “experiences of displacement, sub-

Forgotten men and shining girls

Beukes, Shining Girls, 48.

courthouse document or as a newspaper headline. For example, until Beukes’ imaginative

Simone, AbdouMaliq. “People as Infrastructure: Intersecting Fragments in Johannesburg.” In

You might also like