ABSTRACT
The novels analysed in this study show that authoritarians resort to narrative violence as much as physical violence to protect their monopoly on power. They reveal how epistemic injustice works narratively to sustain power, using techniques such as linear time and epistemic ghosting (for memory management), hierarchies and binaries, and violent silencing, alongside necro-joking, single stories, lies, and post-truth. Exposing these narrative tools as technologies of power that suppress alternative knowledge in order to prevent movement and change, the novels respond with subversive aesthetic techniques including transtemporality, epistemic haunting, guerrilla epistemology, provoking pluralism, and unsilencing, alongside blues irony, curdling, and chiasmus. This, it is argued, is the novels’ animapolitical response to necropolitical oppression: a poetics of movement, or animapoetics.
