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SUMMARY:Crime fiction\, mythomania\, and the criminalisation of the South 
 African state - Dr Christopher Warnes (University of Cambridge)
DTSTART:20151026T170000Z
DTEND:20151026T180000Z
UID:TALK61749@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Victoria Jones
DESCRIPTION:he surge in the popularity of crime fiction in contemporary So
 uth Africa owes much to an ever-increasing sense of threat felt by its mid
 dle-class readers. The characteristic manoeuvre of popular fiction is to i
 mprint fantasy outcomes onto realistic scenarios\, allowing recognisable a
 nxieties to be assuaged by the force of idealisation. Crime fiction lets r
 eaders reflect on the circumstances that give rise to their unease\, and t
 hen affectively installs consoling impressions of legibility and restorati
 on. The threat of bodily harm from an unexpected source is the most obviou
 s of the fears exploited by crime fiction\, but other\, less immediate thr
 eats are negotiated by the genre. In this paper\, I'd like to consider the
  ways recent white-collar crime thrillers represent fraud. Fraud is both t
 he simplest and the most complex of crimes to understand: it involves thef
 t\, straightforwardly\, but it also raises questions to do with truth and 
 lies\, pretence and duplicity. Two contexts for these questions will be ex
 plored here: ANC rhetoric and policy\, and South African corporate capital
 ism. These fields are in many ways characterised by a discrepancy between 
 what is said and what is done: by lying and by fraud. The crime fictions I
  will explore suggest that mythomania may prove to be the defining disposi
 tion of the postapartheid period\, and they provide unique insight into wh
 at is increasingly being identified as the criminalisation of the South Af
 rican state
LOCATION:Seminar Room S1 Alison Richard Building\, 7 West Road\, Cambridge
  CB3 9DT
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