In/justice and necro-natality in Edwidge Danticat’s Brother, I’m Dying

Abstract

IIn a post-9/11 world, theorists such as Judith Butler and Giorgio Agamben argue for the need to reframe politics and justice through a critique of the exclusions, exceptions, and threshold conditions that render life vulnerable or precarious. Edwidge Danticat’s Brother, I’m Dying contributes to this wider discourse about justice through her account of Joseph Dantica’s flight from violence in Haiti and untimely death as an asylum seeker in the United States of America, which she pairs with an account of her pregnancy at the time. Danticat’s inquiry into her uncle’s death leads to a wide-ranging interrogation of Haitian precarity, the claims of non-citizens on the state, and the role of vernacular culture in contesting prevailing paradigms of justice. At the same time, Danticat’s account of her pregnancy links the hopes and fears concerning the gestation of life to biopolitics: the miscarriages of justice, aborted hopes of sovereignty, and stillborn democracies that characterize Haitian history. Danticat’s vision of necro-natality exposes violence and injustice even as it lays claims to a more expansive, pluralistic, and equitable political future, born of an ethics of care and fostered through shared speech and action in the world.

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