Criminal cities

In 2015’s Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature , the Warwick Research Collective (WReC) proposes “reactivat[ing] the theory of combined and uneven development,” by which they mean an economic system in which capitalist formations exist alongside different, usually older, methods of economically organizing society. WReC insists that combined and uneven development is a necessary way of looking at literary and cultural production, for “capitalist development does not smooth away but rather produces unevenness, systematically and as a matter of course.” This chapter will look at the post-Good Friday Agreement literature of Belfast and the post-apartheid literature of Johannesburg to argue that these watershed moments in each city’s history have not achieved full-scale justice or reparations, but have reorganized the city along uneven capitalist development lines. The fault lines of these twenty-first-century cities are often revealed through the conjoined study of crime, imperial legacies, and economics in literature. By examining Stuart Neville’s The Twelve and Lauren Beukes’s Zoo City this chapter will argue that each city and its literature can find resonance in the theory of “combined and uneven development.”