Mega-structural violence: considering African literary perspectives on infrastructure, modernity and destruction

In a 2017 interview,¹ the science fiction writer Jeff VanderMeer described the challenge of communicating climate change in his novels. He explained that ‘global warming is like a haunting because it appears everywhere and nowhere at the same time’; it is hard to ‘give concrete essence’ to phenomena that move slowly and cause feelings of helplessness. In this last point, VanderMeer echoes a concept that philosopher Timothy Morton has called the ‘hyperobject’ (Morton 2013): a thing that is, spatially and temporally, so huge that we are not equipped to comprehend it in its entirety. VanderMeer suggests that literature can make