Necropoetic gestures

Abstract

If necropolitics, according to Achille Mbembe, involves “contemporary forms of subjugation of life to the powers of death,” necropoetics, as proposed here, involves the poetic and gestural interruption of necropolitics. Starting out from a gesture that simulates the act of killing, I ask what sort of anthropology and corresponding mode of writing would be entailed if one were to imaginatively align oneself with that gesture and others like it as they traverse temporal, contextual, and intertextual thresholds - including that between life and death - and the racialized histories recalled thereby. The counter-fabulatory approach taken herein, in pitting the poetic (Black) subtexts of the iterations of this gesture against the varied modes of discourse - ethnographic (part I), historical (part II) and anthropological (part III) - that would capture them, seeks to performatively interrupt the pretense of a neutral language through which necropolitics passes for the continuation of history as usual.