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.
Audio
Date Recorded: 14 Sep 2013Duration: 15:35