Precarity, Systematic and Symbolic Violence in Niq Mhlongo’s Dog Eat Dog

This article applies feminist and critical theories to analyse how South African writer Niq Mhlongo’s novel Dog Eat Dog dramatises the ways in which structural exclusion and economic desperation forge hustler subjectivities in post-2000 Johannesburg. The notions of precarity and neoliberal violence are used to investigate how Mhlongo’s novel depicts the ways in which specific capitalist social arrangements and institutions produce marginality while normalising violence. The article focuses on how Mhlongo’s aesthetic choices, such as the use of satire, episodic structure and alienating urban slang, portray the lived experiences of precarity in post-apartheid South Africa. It analyses plot, setting, characterisation and motif in Dog Eat Dog to focus on how ordinary South Africans navigating urban precarity use symbolic violence to come to terms with the structural violence of neoliberal capitalism. The article provides a critical analysis of the relationship between neoliberalism, precarity and violence in postcolonial South African urban (con)texts.