Table of Contents

Acknowledgements Credits Introduction: Abortion, discourse and ecological metaphor 1 ANIMALS Pregnancy as parasitism in Wilma Stockenström’s The Expedition to the Baobab Tree Listening to beastly riddles Slavery, gestation and infantilization Translating negation A human being and powerful 2 PLANTS Uprooting desire in Zoë Wicomb’s You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town Autopoiesis and the Bildungsroman Apartheid’s abortive environments Seeds of disgust, roots of deviance Creative formations 3 MINERALS The in/organic tragedy of Yvonne Vera’s Butterfly Burning Transforming ‘rock bottom’ Reproductive agency in two abortion scenes Beating hearts or striking rocks 4 HUMANS Queer vitality and Bessie Head’s fiction ‘Something or someone’ and The Collector of Treasures Creative ferment in the Personal Choices trilogy Coda: New African time Conclusion: Questioning power, transforming futures References Notes

Promotional Information

Examining how four writers from Botswana, South Africa, and Zimbabwe address the ethics of abortion and reproductive choice, this book focuses on texts from the late 1970s to the 1990s.

About the Author

Caitlin E. Stobie is a Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Leeds. She is the author of Thin Slices (Verve Poetry Press, 2022). Her personal website is www.caitlinstobie.com.

Reviews

Caitlin Stobie’s Abortion Ecologies in Southern African Fiction situates literature front and centre in important debates about reproductive technologies and women’s bodies in southern Africa, and more broadly. The book confronts questions of secrecy and shame around the subject head-on, pointing out in powerful and persuasive ways that southern African fiction was theorizing abortion and agency in openly feminist terms throughout the period of anti-apartheid struggle. In discussions of Wilma Stockenstrom, Zoe Wicomb, Yvonne Vera and Bessie Head, Stobie argues compellingly that creativity represents a force for social justice.
*Elleke Boehmer, Professor of World Literature in English, University of Oxford, UK*

Reading Abortion Ecologies in Southern African Fiction in the United States in the days after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that guaranteed American women’s right to abortion as a personal medical decision, is a jarring experience. In this moment, it’s clear that Stobie’s work is prescient and timely in its careful analysis of southern African women’s textual representation of the commodification of women’s reproductive capacity within imperial and patriarchal capitalism. Informed by narratives in which southern African women writers process abortion as both lived choice and national metaphor, her analysis unpacks the ways that women’s bodies are always enmeshed in the racist and sexist project of nation building.
*Laura Wright, Professor of English, Western Carolina University, USA*