Towards critical literacies of the flesh: Disclosing and refusing colonial disposability

Abstract Critical studies of world politics urge greater engagement with the dynamics of constituting populations as ‘disposable’. Cautioning against an exclusive focus on contemporary neoliberalism, this article calls attention to the dynamics of colonial disposability, and the transmissibility of its ongoing harms, as they become disclosed through the flesh. Drawing on Hortense Spillers’ distinction between body and flesh, it proposes the flesh as a conceptual device, offering a theoretical account of the flesh’s ‘critical literacies’ in the context of Atlantic slavery and its afterlives. The article reads the movements between the word (discourse, signification) and world (materiality, structure), between body and flesh, in order to desediment both the dynamics of disposability and the flesh’s potentiality for refusal and wayward worldmaking. Through these fleshly literacies, the article examines, first, the production of a complex fungibility imposed on enslaved Africans; second, the de/valuation of Africans (legitimated) through racialisation; and third, the flesh’s illegibility to, and refusal of, the colonial modern order, through its non-normative forms of living and sociality. The discussion enhances our understanding of the inseparability of modernity from violent processes of disposability, and of the transmissibility of the racial significations, ethical exclusions, and affective harms that continue to buttress disposability today.