MONDAY NIGHT LECTURE SERIES | ENERGY AND EXHAUSTION | SPRING 2025

The Corpse in Two Conflicts

Devin Choudhury • Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, Wesleyan University

April 21st @ 6pm • Daniel Family Commons

The human corpse is the liminal figure par excellence: it occupies the threshold between form and decomposition, pure meaning and brute matter, human death and the proliferation of nonhuman life. This talk examines depictions of this liminality in Michael Ondaatje’s 2000 novel Anil’s Ghost and Adania Shibli’s 2017 novel Minor Detail in order to theorize the peculiar political and energetic affordances of the corpse under conditions of civil war, counterinsurgency, and colonial conquest. It demonstrates that these texts portray dead bodies born of statist, necropolitical violence in Sri Lanka and Israel/Palestine, respectively, as uncanny, more-than-human archives. In offering the means to unearth buried histories of atrocity, these archival corpses also derange the orders of knowledge production and authority proper to the state. In turn, they illuminate alternative forms of community and agency that emerge unexpectedly in the face of repression, terror, and exhaustion.

Energy and Exhaustion
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