Composing [ ] Inhuman

I study with M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!: As Told to the Author by Setaey Adamu Boateng (2008) and Sui Ishida’s Tokyo Ghoul (2011–14) to attend to the multiplicity of narrative production of inhuman. These works of art indulge in a labor of composition that makes it exceedingly impossible to study them in total, thereby as an object. Hence, what I hope to do is to forego the failed act of foreclosing them in understanding, and rather study with them some of their components, as they compose the relation between predation and collection, and a claim for a collective(s). In Sui Ishida’s text, manhunting offers the principles of organization of social in a Tokyo inhabited by ghouls and humans. The social of a hunt is such that one is an object of some value when it becomes a prey. NourbeSe Philip’s phonic, sonic, theatrical conglomeration of words, breaths, spaces and names perform an interplay of decomposition and breathing of the enslaved people as they exist in suspension between the bare materiality of body and sparing materialization of life (in gasps, breaths, syllables) while being transported on slave ships. Both works also continually enact an explicit appearance of coming together in a social of collectivity.