ABSTRACT
Chapter 3 turns to the forms that support necropolitics, and to hierarchies and binaries in particular. Hierarchies and binaries begin with what María Lugones calls split-separation, the essential first step in the hierarchical ordering of the world that enables control. The chapter opens with Preti Taneja’s India in We That Are Young, which is shown to be split-separated by gender, class, and wealth. Misogyny is revealed as what Lugones calls a ‘logic of purity’ and as strategic epistemic injustice, when a campaigning patriarch poses as an epistemic hero, Gandhi-style, to defeat his daughters and preserve his power and wealth. In the second part of the chapter the focus shifts to Sharon Dodua Otoo’s Ada’s Realm, the story of one woman who is also four women over six centuries. Ada’s Realm shows how binaries and hierarchies support productiveness in a Nazi concentration camp. But the story begins centuries earlier, when fifteenth-century merchant-colonisers bring split-separation to Africa in the form of racialising geopolitical hierarchies that justify and enable the extraction of value.
