Mors tua, vita mea: Colonial Imaginaries, Embodiment, and Necroassemblages in Italo-African Relations

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At the intersection of postcolonial, decolonial, and feministIR and interdisciplinary critical war studies, the researchproject seeks to analyse death in the longue durée ofimperial wars, colonialism, decolonisation, and migration inItalo-African relations through the lens of assemblagethinking, with a view of unlocking understandings ofembodiment, movement, war, and violence. With aparticular focus on Italy and its relations with Ethiopia,Eritrea, Libya, and Somalia, the research project asks howwe can theorise war, violence, and history when we takeseriously the emergence of a specific necroassemblagewithin colonial imaginaries and empire from the late 19thcentury to today. In this regard, by historicising andmapping out one possibility of what death becomes, I teaseit out as an assemblage comprised of malleable, everfluctuating, and not-compartmentalised webs of space,time, materiality, and meaning. To this end, exploring andassembling textual, visual, objectual, spatial, andconceptual representations of death will function as theanalytic door into the macro workings of colonial violenceand war, and, in a next step, history (or the disregardthereof) and modernity writ large. The aim is an epistemicdeconstruction of the abstraction, knowledge production,erasures, and silences emanating from death, dead bodies,and death-bearing colonially produced imaginaries,realities, and fictionalities in Italo-African relations.