‘State’ violence: The Secret History of Las Vegas

The Secret History of Las Vegas (2014) is the novelist’s elaboration of a short story Abani published in Callaloo in 2011. Those ‘four movements’, as the author entitled the short story, contain the themes and the two interlaced plots that constitute the axis of Abani’s latest novel, such as the power of story-telling, the intersection of history and identitarian processes, the institutionalised racism of South Africa, the queerness of certain bodies, and the ontological and political violence of human life. As the Callaloo short story anticipates, The Secret History of Las Vegas expands subject matters already present in Abani’s previous