ABSTRACT
Since 9/11, a colonial imaginary of Africa as a space of negation has been given new energy. In a reversal of the defusionist myth, its “weak states” are represented as sources of a contagious violence against which the United States must secure itself (Sharp 2013, 238, 242–45). Somalia and the Niger Delta, in particular, have been positioned as lawless places where a primal criminality manifests itself in piracy and kidnapping and renders supposedly civilizing capitalist development impossible. Such representation relies on a (neo)colonial projection of bounded geographical identities that suppresses the violent impact of imperialism in the past and that continues to enable devastating policies of intervention and resource extraction (Gregory 2004; Morton 2013; Sharpe 2013).
