ABSTRACT
Suggesting that epistemic injustice is a narrative problem – a problem of how we tell stories and make sense of experience – the introduction outlines the project of the book and the novels for discussion. They are Mo Yan’s Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out, Serhiy Zhadan’s Voroshilovgrad, George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo, Preti Taneja’s We That Are Young, Olivia Wenzel’s 1000 Coils of Fear, Sharon Dodua Otoo’s Ada’s Realm, and NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names and Glory. A reflection on literary fiction as an object of study in the context of epistemic injustice, power, and resistance is followed by an introduction to the concepts of epistemic, affective, and ontic injustice, and also to Achille Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics. Epistemic injustice, it is suggested, is the epistemological arm of necropolitics – it seeks to block epistemic movement in order to sustain authoritarian power. A notion of animapolitics is brought into play, where animapolitics represents the will to move in the face of necropower’s attempts to petrify. The aesthetic shape of animapolitics is animapoetics.
