Moving laterally from Vickery’s initial gambit, I will look to explore the conditions from which ‘colony collapse’ might be understood as Clemen’s “being caught dead”. Elaborating on thinking concerned with Black subjects in the United States and Africa, I will argue for the centrality of death in the formation of settler colonial sovereignty. Thus conceptualised, contemporary settler colonial poetics can be seen to operate in the ‘underworld’ Vickery delimits, a post-death poetics of jerry-built subjectivities. I will suggest that this is, too, a poetics of the wake: after the funeral, but still drunk on death.

Related Posts

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  Poetic Craft and White-Settler Colonialism

  This workshop brought together eminent Australian and South African poets and critics to consider how poets in societies with a white settler history think about their world through their poetry making.

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  Ann Vickery: Against Colony Collapse Disorder

  Colony collapse disorder describes a phenomenon whereby worker bees have suddenly and inexplicably disappeared from a hive. It has also been mobilised as a syndrome following the rapid vanishing of Western honeybee colonies across North America and Europe. Justin Clemens has also used the term to describe aesthetic collapse, whereby poets can only demonstrate their existence as “being caught dead” given the fragile conditions of poetry and the inevitable, deadly effects of the past.

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  Astrid Lorange in response to Ann Vickery

  Following on associatively from Vickery’s provocations, I will be looking at models for alternative kinships and affinities…