This reading group will focus on the topic of “Merfolk, the Ocean and the Littoral”. It will be chaired by ESTUARY members Dr Maria Geustyn and Marion Troxler and held on the 26th August at 10am to 11am GMT. Please adjust for your own time zone.

We will be discussing a range of creative writing and academic scholarship on the topic of merfolk, curated by Maria and Marion.

Main reading list:

• Percy Zvomuya's short story "Chasing Mermaids", published in The Interpreters: South Africa's New Nonfiction (2025), eds. Sean Christie and Hedley Twidle

• Mohale Mashigo's short story "Monaka" (pp. 18-29), in Mashigo's 2018 short story collection Intruders

• Danny Steur, "Inhuman Kinship at Insensible Depths: Relating to the Non-Relational in Drexciyan Afrofuturism", Extrapolation, vol. 65, no. 1 (2024), https://doi.org/10.3828/extr.2024.5 

• Peter Goggin, "Are Mermaids Real? Rhetorical Discourses and the Science of Merfolk", Shima, vol. 12, no. 2 (2018), 10.21463/shima.12.2.04 

Supplementary readings:

• Excerpt from Mia Arderne's novel Mermaid Fillet (2020)

• Mapule Mohulatsi, "Black Aesthetics and Deep Water: Fish-People, Mermaid Art and Slave Memory in South Africa", Journal of African Cultural Studies, vol. 35, no. 1, DOI: 10.1080/13696815.2023.2169909 

• Harvey L. Hix, "Hybridity is the New Metamorphosis", Comparative Critical Studies, vol. 9, no. 3 (2012), DOI: 10.3366/ccs.2012.0063

• Clair Peter Le Couteur, "Slipping Off the Sealskin: Gender, Species, and Fictive Kinship in Selkie Folktales", Gender Forum: An Internet Journal for Gender Studies, no. 55 (2015)

The Zoom link and all readings are available to ESTUARY members. If you would like to join ESTUARY, please register your details by clicking the “Join the Community” tab at the top of the website.