Invadable “Bodies” and the Violence of Racialization

Abstract

This essay will think through and challenge normative ideas of violence and the body in the discourse of racialized violence. Conceptually leaning on registers of racialization such as invasion and violation, it reads the body beyond the boundaries of the flesh and considers the environment as a body that can be eroded, impaled, or invaded. I examine Igoni Barrett’s Blackass and Imbolo Mbue’s How Beautiful We Were, two thematically unrelated texts, as literature that grapples with varying iterations of racialized bodily violence in contemporary Africa. I argue that Barrett’s protagonist Furo Wariboko’s sudden transformation is imbued with a strategic form of racial violence. I capitalize on how Black bodily metamor-phosis in the text illustrates the colonial nature of violent intrusion. On the other hand, Kosawa the fictional African village in Mbue’s text embodies Rob Nixon’s concept of slow violence in ways that allow the reader to come to terms with resource depletion, abuse, and degradation as violations of the body. Both texts show us what is at stake when racial intentions are visited upon African life forms.