Sam Okoth Opondo

Passages: On geo-analysis and the aesthetics of precarity is a multi-genre and transdisciplinary text addressing themes such as colonialism, nuclear zones of abandonment, migration control regimes, transnational domestic work, the biocolonial hostilities of the hospitality industry, legal precarities behind the international criminal justice regime, the shadow-worlds of the African soccerscape, and immunity regimes related to the COVID-19 pandemic. This book invites inquiry into today’s apocalyptic narratives, humanitarian reason, and international criminal justice regimes, as well as the precarity generated by citizen time and 'consulate time'. The aesthetic breaks emerging from the book’s image-text montage draw attention to the ethics of encounter and passage that challenges colonial, domestic, and nation-statist sovereignty regimes of inattention.

Taking seriously the critical conception of diplomacy as the mediation of estrangement (by James Der Derian, Costas Constantinou, Noe Cornago et al), this book turns to the politics and laws that tie modern diplomacy to colonial cultures and the ‘genres of Man’ that they privilege. In an attempt to read ‘the diplomatic’ from the African postcolony, the book probes the injunction at the center of the law of genre that states that ‘genres are not to be mixed.’ This enables it to investigate the citational/recitational forms of knowledge and practices of recognition that reproduce the diplomatic and colonial order of things in the African context. Through a reading of literature, philosophy, and a multiplicity of everyday practices in Africa and its diasporas, the book explores amateur diplomatic practices that provide a counter-force to laws that prescribe faithfulness to a norm/form while proscribing the mixing of genres.The main themes running through the theoretical and fictional texts include: amateur diplomacies, colonial laws of genre and genres of ‘man’, and the ethics of co-habitation. The different chapters focus on multiple conceptions of the foreign body (as extra-terrestrial aliens, disease, foreign organ, monsters, diplomats, non-citizens etc), postcolonial urban life,