And now we are sisters’: fracture, trauma and the limits of female solidarity in On Black Sisters’ Street

And now we are sisters’: fracture, trauma and the limits of female solidarity in On Black Sisters’ Street

Mavengano, E. (2026) ‘‘And now we are sisters’: fracture, trauma and the limits of female solidarity in On Black Sisters’ Street’, African Identities, pp. 1–13. doi: 10.1080/14725843.2026.2650399. Abstract: In Chika Unigwe’s On Black Sisters’ Street, African women confront the harsh realities of transnational sex work, forming fleeting connections in a world that continues to deny their presence. This study examines the novel’s nuanced inscriptions of trauma, fractured intimacies and the precarious solidarity that forms even amid systems of exploitation. I draw primarily on Cathy Caruth’s trauma theory while engaging Judith Butler’s notions of precarity and (un)grievable lives alongside African feminist epistemologies to analyse the intersecting structures of racial abjection, sexism, neoliberal class exploitation and restrictive migration regimes that shape the protagonists’ lives within transnational sites of disposability and erasure. I argue that the author strategically employs the narrative of abjection to present an intricate ethical terrain in which ambivalent, sometimes troubled, female bonds are formed within the claustrophobic, surveilled confines of transnational spaces. Although these alliances are profoundly fractured, they signify an essential yet fragile possibility of sisterhood created within zones of neglect, violence and anguish. Unigwe employs a non-linear plot, deferred memory and an affective lexicon of suffering to engender a radical narrative politics attentive to brokenness. I interpret the motifs of self-naming, migration and self-mourning as forms of feminist resistance to oppressive structures. This study therefore demonstrates that the novel depicts female bonding as a hard-won resource that enables survival and concurrently asserts an insurgent, transformative politics of becoming. From trauma’s fractures, the pulse of sisterhood flickers into view in Unigwe’s work. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit necropolitics.substack.com [https://necropolitics.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

Conspicuous Destruction, Aspiration and Motion in the South African Township

Jones, M. (2013) ‘Conspicuous Destruction, Aspiration and Motion in the South African Township’, Safundi, 14(2), pp. 209–224. doi: 10.1080/17533171.2013.776749. Abstract: The paper limns modes of consumption and wastefulness in recent South African fiction about the township. It draws upon moves of aspiration and carelessness articulated in the youth practice I’khothane to think through the ways in which conspicuous destruction around car-use maps onto township socialities. Accordingly, it compares Sifiso Mzobe’s Young Blood and David Dinwoodie-Irving’s African Cookboy as texts utilizing scenes of consumption and destruction with a variety of effects. While commodity ownership and disposal enunciate identities that can unsettle the status quo, the article argues that aspiration alone cannot provide resources with which to shift structural inequalities persisting in South African cities. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit necropolitics.substack.com [https://necropolitics.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

Queer punishments: School safety and youth of color in the United States

Orum Hernández, G. and Barcelos, C. (2023) ‘Queer punishments: School safety and youth of color in the United States’, Equity & Excellence in Education, 56(1–2), pp. 87–99. doi: 10.1080/10665684.2022.2159897. Abstract: Although educational research and policymaking in the United States has generally framed LGBTQ youth and youth of color as mutually exclusive groups, LGBTQ youth of color are increasingly included in discourses surrounding school safety. These discourses tend to position youth as vulnerable, at-risk subjects who are passive victims of interpersonal homophobia. Using the theoretical frameworks queer of color critique and queer necropolitics, and a situational analysis mapping strategy, we analyzed GLSEN’s 2019 National School Climate Survey report, breakout reports on LGBTQ youth of color, and related advocacy efforts. These frameworks helped us consider how school climate research and policymaking relies on carceral logics that center and uphold whiteness. The GLSEN reports function as a form of embedded science that mobilizes individual understandings of violence and queer investments in punishment. We offer queer of color critique as a strategy for researchers and policymakers to get unstuck on school safety. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit necropolitics.substack.com [https://necropolitics.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

Gendering (in)security: interrogating security logics within states of exception

Dingli, S. and Purewal, N. (2018) ‘Gendering (in)security: interrogating security logics within states of exception’, Third World Thematics: A TWQ Journal, 3(2), pp. 153–163. doi: 10.1080/23802014.2018.1510295. Abstract: This collection contributes to debates, which seek to move feminist scholarship away from the reification of the war/peace and security/economy divides. However, rather than focusing on the terms of the debate, it foregrounds the empirical reality of the breakdown of these traditional divisions, paying particular attention to the ‘state of exception’ and similar frameworks. In doing so, contributors to this collection trouble the ubiquitous concept and practices of ‘(in)security’ and their effects on differentially positioned subjects. By gendering (in)securities in ‘states of exception’ and other paradigms of government related to it, especially in postcolonial and neo-colonial contexts, it provides an approach, which allows us to study the complex and interrelated security logics, which constitute the messy realities of different – and particularly vulnerable – subjects’ lives. In other words, it suggests that these frameworks are ripe for feminist interventions and analyses of the logics and production of (in)securities as well as of resistance and hybridisation. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit necropolitics.substack.com [https://necropolitics.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

Demographic engineering and identity erasure: China's securitization of the Uyghur population

Kasim, M. (2025) ‘Demographic engineering and identity erasure: China’s securitization of the Uyghur population’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, pp. 1–21. doi: 10.1080/01419870.2025.2580516. Abstract: This article analyses China’s governance of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region as a case of demographic engineering, understood as a set of state-directed measures that reshape the reproductive, cultural, and spatial continuity of a population. Drawing on theories of biopolitics (Foucault), necropolitics (Mbembe), and securitization, the paper interprets a coordinated strategy of birth suppression, child separation, linguistic assimilation, and demographic restructuring. Using a qualitative case study design, it triangulates official statistics, state discourse, and international reports to map how these practices operate. The analysis demonstrates that the dismantling of Uyghur group continuity aligns with patterns identified in genocide scholarship, with some measures corresponding to acts listed in the 1948 UN Genocide Convention. The article contributes conceptually by showing how modern authoritarian regimes employ technocratic and demographic instruments to preempt resistance and transform social identity, expanding theoretical debates on repression, population management, and slow forms of group destruction. 0 This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit necropolitics.substack.com [https://necropolitics.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]