Mors tua, vita mea: Colonial Imaginaries, Embodiment, and Necroassemblages in Italo-African Relations

At the intersection of postcolonial, decolonial, and feminist
IR and interdisciplinary critical war studies, the research
project seeks to analyse death in the longue durée of
imperial wars, colonialism, decolonisation, and migration in
Italo-African relations through the lens of assemblage
thinking, with a view of unlocking understandings of
embodiment, movement, war, and violence. With a
particular focus on Italy and its relations with Ethiopia,
Eritrea, Libya, and Somalia, the research project asks how
we can theorise war, violence, and history when we take
seriously the emergence of a specific necroassemblage
within colonial imaginaries and empire from the late 19th
century to today. In this regard, by historicising and
mapping out one possibility of what death becomes, I tease
it out as an assemblage comprised of malleable, everfluctuating, and not-compartmentalised webs of space,
time, materiality, and meaning. To this end, exploring and
assembling textual, visual, objectual, spatial, and
conceptual representations of death will function as the
analytic door into the macro workings of colonial violence
and war, and, in a next step, history (or the disregard
thereof) and modernity writ large. The aim is an epistemic
deconstruction of the abstraction, knowledge production,
erasures, and silences emanating from death, dead bodies,
and death-bearing colonially produced imaginaries,
realities, and fictionalities in Italo-African relations.