Abstract Readers of Zakes Mda are familiar with the postcolonial provenance of his novels, in which magic realism, indigenous knowledge sensibility, and history are seamlessly stitched into the narrative fabric. Mda’s fiction is no less notable for its galaxy of animal characters—both minor and major dramatis personae— that interact with humans. Whilst the novel Little Suns (Cape Town: Umuzi, 2015) is synopsised on the dust cover as “a touching story of love and perseverance that can transcend exile and strife”, it is also memorable on account of the textual space Mda accords a horse named Gcazimbane, the subject of the entire second chapter of the book. Embedded in a postcolonial/posthuman hermeneutic, and inflected equally by insights from affect theory, this article sets out to investigate the deconstructive, interstitial spaces in a novel that, on the one hand, is essentially about the killing of the district magistrate Hamilton Hope by members of the amaMpondomise clan in late nineteenth-century South Africa and, on the other, about a human–animal embodied relationship. The article underwrites the viability of a posthuman/postcolonial aesthetic, in tandem with affect theory, to focus on the relationship between a man and a horse taken to a phantasmagorical dimension.

中文翻译：

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Zakes Mda 的《小太阳》中的后殖民/后人类关系

摘要 Zakes Mda 的读者熟悉他小说的后殖民出处，其中魔幻现实主义、本土知识敏感性和历史无缝拼接到叙事结构中。Mda 的小说同样以其与人类互动的动物角色——无论是次要的还是主要的戏剧人物——而著称。虽然小说《小太阳》（开普敦：Umuzi，2015）在封面上被概括为“一个可以超越流放和冲突的爱和毅力的感人故事”，也因为文本空间Mda赋予了马名为 Gcazimbane，这本书的整个第二章的主题。本文嵌入在后殖民/后人类的解释学中，同样受到情感理论的见解的影响，着手调查小说中的解构性间隙空间，一方面，本质上是关于 19 世纪晚期南非 amaMpondomise 氏族成员杀害地方法官汉密尔顿霍普，另一方面，关于人与动物具身化的关系。这篇文章证实了后人类/后殖民美学的可行性，与情感理论相结合，专注于一个人与马之间的关系，被带到一个幻想的维度。