Notes

1. I was motivated by my anger at the U.S. Senate’s (happily now abandoned) policy of ABC—Abstain, Be faithful, Condomize—in its approach to HIV prevention in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Abstinence may not be possible and/or desirable; women may be faithful, but their partners may well not be, especially in the context of migrant labor systems; and women are not usually empowered to enjoin the use of the male condom (the female condom not having been provided or even available in many areas of the SSA countries).

2. A camp or holding pen for animals, surrounded by a secure protective fence made of thorn bushes.

3. This phenomenon is so widespread as to be ubiquitous, and therefore perversely complex to annotate. A good starting point would be Hund and Mills 2016; the South African iteration usually references the Chacma Baboon (see, for example, Debut 2015). On the complex engagement between Black and white participants in South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission over nonhuman animals, including baboons, see the chapter in Jolly 2010 entitled “Going to the Dogs” (53–81).

4. For a history of Alan Taylor, see Noble 2013. For an exploration of pollution in Wentworth, see Chari 2013.

1. Ince’s volume contains much more on colonial capitalism, and for excellent work on relations between capitalism and settler colonialism, see Veracini 2015.

2. Veracini, too, is insistent on the present of the settler colonial age, as the title of his book states. He asserts that “settler colonialism makes sense especially if it is understood globally, and that we live in a settler colonial global present” (2015, 53).

3. I use scare quotes around “environment” when I mean it to refer not to the Man-centered concept of environment with a big E, but do not when I intend it to be part of the co-constituted subject: human, nonhuman animal, and environment.

4. For excellent writing on such love, see Simpson 2013.

5. GHRVs are defined by the Human Rights Commission of the United Nations as “torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment or punishment, summary and arbitrary executions, disappearances, arbitrary detentions, all forms of racism, racial discrimination and apartheid, foreign occupation and alien domination, xenophobia, poverty, hunger and other denials of economic, social and cultural rights, religious intolerance, terrorism, discrimination against women and lack of the rule of law” (U.N. World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna 1993). The term was used relatively early to critique apartheid (partially explaining the full adoption of the term by South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission): the 1967 U.N. Resolution 1235 of the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) compelled the U.N. Commission “to examine information relevant to gross violations of human rights, as exemplified by the policy of apartheid” (Limon and Power 2014, 5). GHRVs would appear not so much to qualify HRVs in terms of relative harm, but rather in terms of clusters of violations that indicate structural rather than interpersonal violence. On the variability of the definition of GRHVs, see Liwanga 2015.

6. See, for example, Coetzee 1982, on “Idleness,” and Povinelli 1995, on White Australian ignorance of Aboriginal labor, discussed later in chapter 5. One way of ignoring contemporary Aboriginal presence is to suggest that the Khoi/Inuit/“Indian” “belongs” only in the past and is therefore out of place in metropolitan settings such as universities: a reality that redounds further burdens on Indigenous subjects who work as professionals. See, for example, “This Beautiful Disaster” in Simpson’s 2013 Islands of Decolonial Love.

7. Hypercapitalism is defined as a “term used by Marxist scholars, in their continuing critique of political economy, to depict a relatively new form of capitalistic social organization marked by the speed and intensity of global flows that include exchange of both material and immaterial goods, people, and information. Hypercapitalism, sometimes referred to as ‘corporate capitalism,’ is blamed by critical scholars for causing misbalance and fragmentation of social life by allowing commercial or business interests to penetrate every aspect of human experience. In other words, critical scholars believe that once-separate spheres of culture and commerce now overlap and that, in return, culture and the way of life in a hypercapitalist society becomes subsumed by the commercial sphere.” (Vujnovic 2017).

8. For more on persistence, see Eubanks 2019, 4–7.

9. See, for just two examples, Robertson and Henderson’s brilliant 2010 graphic novel, 7 Generations, and Ruffo’s 2010 film A Windigo Tale.

10. “Choice disabled” is the term Neil Andersson uses to disavow the kind of body-snatching in which the person who cannot choose (not to be raped, in this case, but the term is one I extend to those not able to eat healthy food owing to cost, etc.) has choice bestowed theoretically on them to “prove” that individual so-called bad choices are the reason for ill health (2006, 1–3).

1. In Jolly and Fyfe (2018), we deal extensively with the question of the shortcomings of new materialism in relation to both the questions of deconstructing the liberal human-subject and the question of human rights. Suffice it to say, for the moment, that my critique of the new materialism is based on, first, a denial or ignorance of earlier traditions of African and Indigenous animisms and, second, a focus on the “object’s” agency, rather than human capacity for interrelationality with the “objects” of new materialism.

2. Lazarus is referring to the fascination many postcolonial critics of the 1980s and 1990s had with texts that evaded a realist form. Exemplary texts here would be Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, J. M. Coetzee’s Foe, and Wilson Harris’s Guyana Quartet, to name a representative few. Perhaps indicative of this tension is the discussion between David Attwell and Denita Parry in Attridge and Jolly 1998 concerning Coetzee’s supposed abstraction.

3. In this respect I agree with Butler and Gambetti and Sabsay that the human rights framework can devalue modes of resistance within the populations it designates vulnerable (2016, 6). What I do not see in Butler’s work on vulnerability and resistance, however, is an imaginative reenvisioning of the genre of the human, with which the “presumptive framework” of human rights is so deeply entangled, as I shall argue presently.

4. I am aware of the rejections of resilience as a neoliberal tool for the governance and maintenance of the impoverished at the level of subjects and the “developing” state in Neocleous 2013 and Bracke 2016. I use “persistence” to mean that the precarious, or more inclusively, the effluent, have resources their wealthier counterparts do not have and that the effluent do not have to “give” these resources, which in this case are not objects per se. I also thank my colleague, Charlotte Eubanks (2019) for our conversations about persistence.

5. I understand global capitalism to encompass a broad-spread belief in competitive capitalism as necessity, rather than a chosen way of sociopolitical organization. I also associate capitalism with modes of governance that, whether nationalist or pro-multinational capital flows, see government in the first instance as chief assistant to capitalist industry, not as protector of a range of citizens’ rights, not limited to the right to work and/or accumulate capital—that is, as simply protector of the producer-as-consumer.

6. I discuss Berlant’s theory at length in chapter 3, where I focus on issues of substance use.

7. This is a version of Arendt’s paradox that, to be protected as a citizen, one has to have the protection of the state, but those who require the protection of citizenship are the stateless: “If a human being loses his political status, he should, according to the implications of the inborn and inalienable rights of man, come under exactly the situation for which the declarations of such general rights provided. Actually, the opposite is the case. It seems that a man who is nothing but a man has lost the very qualities that make it possible for other people to treat him as a fellow-man” (1976, 300).

8. I recognize that I am entertaining a very specific reading here of both Mphahlele and his African humanism, and do not have the scope here to rehearse the exhaustive body of literature written on either African humanism or specifically Mpahelele’s version of it. For further reference, see Obee 1999 and Mphahlele 1962; 2002.

9. There is an extent to which my argument here may be seen to resemble that of Karen Barad, who claims that “language has been granted too much power” (2003, 801). However, the focus on representation to the exclusion of the subjectivity of matter is not a global phenomenon. There are cultures, including cultures of the effluent, in which matter has never stopped being “substance in its intra-active becoming—not a thing, but a doing, a congealing of agency” (822). The primacy of cultural representation that obscures matter is not a universal phenomenon. Barad implies as much when, citing Joseph Rouse, she describes representationalism as a Cartesian byproduct: the Cartesian legacy proposes that we have more direct access to our thoughts than to the things “outside” us (806). Yet, once again, the Cartesian legacy is not every culture’s legacy. Further, I do not use the language of posthumanism, since its understanding of racism is insufficient. While posthumanism understands the importance of racist thought in the establishment of the “human,” as Jackson puts it: “I wonder if posthumanists are willing to go one step beyond a critique of the discourse of ‘primitivity’ by also engaging the knowledge production of those deemed primitive?” (2013, 681).

10. African humanism’s overwhelming choice of pronoun is masculine. One has to be careful about reading too much into this, however, as many African languages, including isiZulu, do not have pronouns that indicate gender.

11. This set of beliefs is commonly held, as Mphahlele evidences. Perhaps the most cited reference in this regard is Soyinka’s 1976 Myth, Literature and the African World.

12. On the issue of the unborn in relation to abortion, Butler argues that “it is not possible to base arguments for reproductive freedom, which include rights to abortion, on a conception of what is living and what is not” (2009, 18).

13. Here I am using the figure of the placenta against itself, as metonymy, like metaphor, is a figure of speech. I am using the word in the sense of a material part of the subject, not in the sense of a representation of such a materiality.

14. Yet not with the inhuman, owing to my reenvisioning of human rights as nonanthropocentric practices of rightness.

15. This was in 1995, and still some time before the domination of the HIV sensibility my generation later experienced, in which HIV was an environment and not an event, as I noted in the preface.

16. Samin interviewed Mphahlele in 1995, and Mphahlele was unable to write his proposed fiction, discussed with Samin, before his death in 2008. I like to think of this prospective fiction as an unborn subject.

17. Apartheid encouraged the “tribalization” of African languages through a fetishized attachment of them to the notorious and deceptively named “homelands” to which it relegated the Black population. This factor, together with the use of English in the relatively liberal mission schools for Blacks, and the imposition of Afrikaans as the medium of instruction for state-run Black schools (the impetus for the Soweto schoolchildren’s riots of 1976), contributed to the choice of English over Indigenous languages for Black literary production in South Africa.

18. In his Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel infamously relegates Africa, particularly sub-Saharan Africa, to the realm of the “unhistorical,” as it is “undeveloped land” that remains “enmeshed in the natural spirit” (1977, 190). In this sense, Africa would never have been considered a contender in Hegel’s master–slave dialectic outlined in the above work. While there are many readings of racism in Hegel, an astute analysis of his treatment of Africa in his Lectures on the Philosophy of World History (1837) remains that of Ronald Kuykendall 1993.

19. “Coffin fly” is a generic name for several species of flies that arrive in sequence to feed on decaying flesh and to lay their eggs in the corpse, which provides food for their offspring. It should be noted that these flies are not selective; they feed on many kinds of materials other than corpses but are adept at getting into sealed spaces holding decaying matter, like coffins.

20. From 2001 until 2006 Stephen Lewis worked as the United Nations special envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa. His task, which he effected with deep commitment, was to draw attention to the HIV/AIDS epidemic and convince leaders and the public of their responsibility in curtailing it.

21. For more on Mbeki’s AIDS denialism, see the final chapter of Jolly 2010.

1. While the link provided in the bibliography that originally accessed this page now accesses amended material for 2022, the same elements are still there in substance, if not identical in form. The two quotes from WHO that follow are mentioned as is in the 2022 link, apart from the deletion of “AIDS” in the second one.

2. For the figure of the zombie as both consumer-duppy and embodiment of the failure of advanced capitalism, see Lauro and Embry 2008; Moreman 2011; Sutherland and Swan 2011; Lauro 2011a, 2011b; Boluk and Lenz 2011.

3. The more recent link (2014) at cdc.gov/nchhstp/socialdeterminants reads rather differently: “Social determinants of health (SDOH) are the non-medical factors that influence health outcomes. They are the conditions in which people are born, grow, work, live, and age, and the wider set of forces and systems shaping the conditions of daily life. As defined by the World Health Organization these forces (e.g., racism, climate) and systems include economic policies and systems, development agendas, social norms, social policies, and political systems.”

4. This aporia is highlighted by Anderson 1998, Bleakley, Brice Brown, and Bligh 2008, and Jolly 2016.

5. The most recent and useful discussion of this is in the essays in Butler, Gambetti, and Sabsay 2016.

6. This is an all-but-direct quotation from Harraway, except that I have substituted virus–human for dog–human. The original reads: “How might an ethics and politics of significant otherness be learned from taking the dog-human relationships seriously? And, how might stories about dog-human worlds finally convince brain-damaged Americans, and maybe less historically challenged people, that history matters in naturecultures?” (2003, 3). I have excluded the term “brain-damaged” because, while the American exceptionalism to which Harraway refers is extant and well, her terms for referencing it are not mine. In fact, there may well be clinically brain-damaged Americans who understand the history of nature-cultures better than their fellow citizens without clinical disability.

7. In particular, Paul Farmer’s work on Haiti (2006, 2011) is notable for its connection of structural violence to health outcomes. In my introduction I have attempted to supplement his work by first clearly defining structural violence in health-care settings in terms of Johan Galtung’s original introduction of the subject (1969) and then locating that term in the context of the contemporary outcomes of colonialist-capitalist violence in terms of the Warwick Research Collective’s definition of combined and uneven development (2015).

8. In some sense, a posthuman reading is impossible, as such a reading carries its own utopian bent: how can humans extract themselves from a reading of anything, let alone the entanglements of human migrations and disease? Further, if one understands that the apex of anthropocentric power accrues its benefits differentially through place, race, and space, as it were, the notion that we should now become posthuman, before anthropocentric human’s others (female, Black, LBGT, of the global South) have been accorded their “anthropocentric” right, dodges the ethical conundrum of combined but unequal development far too nicely.

9. The Krio (“Creole”) comprise African American, West Indian, and liberated African-originating peoples of Sierra Leone.

10. The name “Maroon,” according to Merriam-Webster, is probably from French maron, marron (feral, fugitive), and modification of American Spanish cimarrón (wild, savage). Oxford English Dictionary confirms this origin from marron (feral) and cimarrón (wild). Generally, the term refers to descendants of escaped slaves from the West Indies, specifically Jamaica. The Maroons fought two wars against British incursion in the eighteenth century, both ending with treaties being signed between the British and the Maroons.

11. As first reported in The Washington Post and later by NBC, President Trump grew frustrated with lawmakers in the Oval Office when they discussed protecting immigrants from Haiti, El Salvador, and African countries as part of a bipartisan immigration deal, according to several people briefed on the meeting. “Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?” Trump asked, according to these people, referring to countries mentioned by the lawmakers. Trump then suggested that the United States should instead bring more people from countries such as Norway. In addition, the president singled out Haiti, telling lawmakers that immigrants from that country must be left out of any deal, these people said. “Why do we need more Haitians?” Trump said, according to people familiar with the meeting. “Take them out” (Vitali, Hunt, and Thorp 2018).

12. Cholera is a bacterium, not a virus, but I note it here as yet another instance of disease introduction in the wake of humanitarian intervention.

13. Weheliye points to the obscured element of race in Agamben’s overlooking of the Musselman as the term used for both women and men followers of Islam.

14. See U.S. DHHS, Office of Minority Health (OMH), n.d.a. Also using the “consumer” language, OMH n.d.b merges various definitions together to state that culture is the blended patterns of human behavior that include “language, thoughts, communications, actions, customs, beliefs, values, and institutions of racial, ethnic, religious, or social groups,” cultural competence is “a set of congruent behaviors, attitudes, and policies that come together in a system, agency, or among professionals that enables effective work in cross-cultural situations,” and competence in the term cultural competence implies that an individual or organization has the capacity to function effectively “within the context of the cultural beliefs, behaviors, and needs presented by consumers and their communities.” Material from the OMH n.d.b can also be found through the National Institute of Health at www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK248431/, which gives a link to it and where the emphasis on consumers as clients is even more noticeable (but it is impossible to tell which wording there actually comes from the OMH document). Patients in the United States cannot but be consumers, unlike those in, say, Canada and Sweden, where the state is the provider, not corporations.

15. A number of so-called hemorrhagic fevers exist. All of the virus families can cause hemorrhagic fevers, but they share a very limited set of common characteristics: a basic structure consisting of a core of ribonucleic acid (RNA) as the genetic material, surrounded by a fatty material; dependency on a nonhuman animal or insect host for survival; and spread to humans from the infected host; as well as (in many of them) person-to-person infection. Outbreaks may be unpredictable but do not occur outside of the areas of inhabitation of the reservoir host. In the case of Ebola, it is not yet proved but is believed that African fruit bats are the reservoir species. In the 2014 outbreak, roughly 18 percent of the infected developed hemorrhagic fever. Alan Schmaljohn, a virologist and professor of microbiology and immunology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, states, “I’ve long disliked the lumping of ‘hemorrhagic fever viruses’ with one term, because they are such different viruses, with different physical and genetic characteristics, and hemorrhage is not a consistent feature of any of them” (cited in Palermo 2014). As Dr. Louis Katz says, “Ebola has that reputation. . . . But it’s really just a small minority of people infected who bleed significantly” (cited in Schattner 2015). Platelets, the clotting factor in blood, do diminish in Ebola cases, but often not sufficiently to cause hemorrhagic bleeding.

16. See, for example, Coscarelli 2014.

1. On March 28, 1979, Three Mile Island in southeastern Pennsylvania was the site of the worst commercial nuclear accident in history, releasing multiple noxious gases into the environment.

2. For an astute assessment of the implications of this history for the present, see Magoc 2014.

3. Dunoon is a large, Black informal settlement on the outskirts of Cape Town where tensions seethe. Anger and disgruntlement over lack of housing and services, minimal policing, massive overcrowding, resentment of large numbers of foreign African immigrants/migrants/illegals, disputes over taxi routes, and territorial gangs manifest themselves in violent outbreaks of arson, shootings, and xenophobic attacks.

4. One of the most infamous of Hendrik Verwoerd’s quotations, from a policy speech on “Bantu” education, reads as follows: “There is no place for [the Bantu] in the European community above the level of certain forms of labour. . . . What is the use of teaching the Bantu child mathematics when it cannot use it in practice? That is quite absurd. Education must train people in accordance with their opportunities in life, according to the sphere in which they live” (Verwoerd 1954, 24). The speech is quoted and discussed in Clark and Worger 2004, 48–52.

5. The massacre of thirty-four striking platinum miners on August 16, 2012, near the village of Marikana in South Africa marked the first deadly use of the South African police forces since apartheid (Bell 2016).

6. In this respect, Dian Million’s warning that therapy geared at rendering a body fit for further capitalist extraction and production is toxic (2013), suggests even more pertinently that a refusal to hand oneself over to most projects of therapeutic rehabilitation is an aspect of persistence.

7. For more on the historical figure of Ambroise Paré, barber-surgeon to kings, see Hamby 1967.

8. For more on this history, see Zackie Achmat and the Treatment Action Campaign in South Africa, which he founded. It’s My Life (Tilley 2001) is a film made of his refusal to take antiretroviral drugs to assert the right of all South Africans to government-provided ARVs.

1. For example, when I worked on a project that had a protocol asking about the onset of what is coyly called “sexual debut” in adolescents in KwaZulu-Natal (KZN), the translators pointed out that sexual relationships among youth in that area do not see penetration as a marker of sexual intercourse, but a range of behaviors, including “thigh sex,” or ukusoma in isiZulu. Mark Hunter discusses “thigh sex” as rejected in particularly urban modes of isoka, or masculinity status, but in rural areas ukusoma is more broadly not only recognized but practiced (2002). I recognize Hunter’s careful distinctions between actual practices and the invention of “tradition,” especially by elder men, such as chief’s advisers (izInduna) and chiefs (amaKosi), but this does not mean the practice can be relegated to history. I take the warning of Hein De Vries et al. that statistics for sexual debut may include participants who see ukusoma counting as the onset as a further indication in this regard (2014, 1093). John Imrie et al. also note that researchers, overlooking ukusoma may lead to an inaccurate picture of HIV risk in men who have sex with men in rural South African communities (2013, S73).

2. For example, see Kappelman on the systemic violence expressed by the U. S. Department of Veteran Affairs in its obstruction of the claim of victim-survivors of MSA (military sexual assault) to services for PTSD, as opposed to survivors of non-MSA-related PTSD (2011). It is telling in this context that Kappelman refers to MSA rather than what he calls the “somewhat euphemistic” term “personal assault.” This is because the latter erases the context of the military in sexual assault cases in which both perpetrator and victim are members of the armed forces.

3. See Bourdieu 2000, 142–43: “The agent engaged in practice knows the world . . . too well, without objectifying distance; he takes it for granted, precisely because he is caught up in it, bound up with it; he inhabits it like a garment; . . . he feels at home in the world because the world is also in him, in the form of the habitus.”

4. For work on the need to look at public health in Indigenous communities within the broader fabric of the negative, intergenerational health effects of settler colonialism, see Crawford 2014; Paradies 2016; James et al. 2014; Kirmayer 2015; Kirmayer et al. 2011.

5. For an excellent set of analyses of the refusal of such victimization, see Rifkin 2012. My thinking on this has also been informed by Armand Garnet Ruffo’s depiction of interracial sexual assault in his acclaimed film A Windigo Tale and Robertson and Henderson’s 2010 graphic novel series for adolescents on the intergenerational effects of abuse, including sexual abuse, in the residential school systems.

6. For excellent sources on transactional sex, see Hunter 2002 and Leclerc-Madlala 2004.

7. See, for example, the statement that “childhood abuse is an intergenerational problem” in Robertson and Henderson 2010 and Johnson and James 2016.

8. There is very little data on the clinical treatment of infant rape survivors—merely calls for research on the topic, especially from South Africa, where such rapes were reported in a spate, particularly from 2001 onward (see Pitcher and Bowley 2002; Dutton 2013; Bowley and Pitcher 2002; As, Millar, and Rode 2002; Abrahams and Mathews 2008; Cox et al. 2007; Booysen et al. 2008; Marchetti-Mercer 2003; Richter 2003; Meier 2002; Jewkes, Martin, and Penn-Kekana 2002). Researchers have found that, before age three, it is extremely difficult to trace events of trauma, including sexual trauma, to the later development of subjects, in part because discrete memory-making appears at roughly age three and after (Colarusso 2010, 8; Gaensbauer and Bauer 2009). Gaensbauer summarizes the situation thus: “Young children’s cognitive immaturity does not preclude them from developing some kind of memory for a traumatic event, though children younger than 18 months of age will tend to have fewer symptoms in the reexperiencing category compared with those in older children” (Coates and Gaensbauer 2009, 616).

9. I have had extensive conversations with Professor Steve Collings on this aspect of childhood survivors’ needs. Professor Collings runs a clinic for abused children and adolescents in Durban, KZN, and teaches psychology at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. Drawing and other forms of play therapy can be very effective in treating child survivors of sexual assault, but only if the child is in a stable setting at home and the therapist builds a relation of trust between the child, the physical environment of the therapist’s office, and the therapist’s own person (Coates and Gaensbauer 2009). Evidence suggests, too, that how children manifest symptoms after sexual assault depends on not only the repetition of trauma (not necessarily sexual assault trauma, repetition of trauma being the most important factor in post-sexual-assault recovery), but also the age at the time of the assault. Prior to twelve years of age, evidence shows that children are likely to develop symptoms of depression; after age twelve, the children are ten times more likely to develop PTSD (Schoedl et al. 2010).

10. See chapter 3 of Cultured Violence, entitled “Women, Stigma and the Performance of Alienation,” in Jolly 2010, 82–116.

11. Joseph Pierre notes the dependence of psychiatry on World War I and World War II as the precipitators or “triggers” of a preexistent predilection for mental disorder, where war itself is considered as an event, not a series of events (2013). Recognition of “battle fatigue,” “combat exhaustion,” and “shell-shock” among soldiers from the two wars crystallized the notion that mental illness was often precipitated by reactions to trauma, particularly among individuals with some latent “predisposition to maladjustment” (Cohen 1983, 127). Psychiatrists participated in mass screenings of prospective draftees in World War II, with 1.75 million men ultimately rejected from service based on increasing recognition of “neurotic” as opposed to “psychotic” symptoms and disorders (Horwitz 2002). These “psychoneurotic” syndromes were not catalogued within preexisting psychiatric classification manuals, necessitating revised nosologies encompassing a much broader scope of mental disorder that culminated in the publication of the first Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 1952 by the Committee on Nomenclature and Statistics of the American Psychiatric Association (Pierre 2013, 107). See also Kinghorn 2013 on the history of the definition of mental disorder.

12. As Calvin Colarusso writes: “A recent study of thousands of HMO members [Anda et al. 2006] once again confirmed the relationship between early adverse childhood experiences such as childhood sexual abuse and a wide variety of psychological disorders and problems. But more importantly, the researchers also found a clear relationship between the number of adverse experiences in childhood and the degree of psychopathology in adulthood. Earlier and more intense adversity produced a greater number of maladaptive outcomes” (2010, 3).

13. This refers to the Access Hollywood outtake in which Donald Trump was recorded saying “When you’re famous, . . . you can do anything to [women]. Grab ’em by the pussy, anything,” which he subsequently defended as “locker room talk” (Victor 2017).

1. Dian Million’s 2013 Therapeutic Nations documents the dependence of Canadian sovereignty on violence against Aboriginal women. Sarah Deer, in a companion project, her 2015 The Beginning and End of Rape, articulates the intertwining of the U.S. legal system, through the Federal Indian Law, to the project of Aboriginal women’s sexual victimization in the United States.

2. For histories of the terms “human” and “human right” and their definitions in the practice of the United Nations and others, see Smeulers and Grunfeld 2011. For the technical, detailed definition of “Gross Human Rights Violations” by the Human Rights Commission of the United Nations and the term’s history in U.N. literature, see note 5 in the introduction.

3. Nor is it to ignore the fact that posthuman environmentalism itself often ignores: that the exploitation of world resources has been enjoyed by a privileged few and enabled by exploitative labor. Thus there is a moral question involved in asking countries on the “low” side of unequal development to be equally responsible for the (re)distribution of ecological responsibility.

4. It bears repeating that, within colonialist governance, the native’s failings to conform to the norms assumed in that governance render the native “naturally” pathological. This becomes especially apparent in readings of Indigenous communities in relation to their health and sexuality. See Ahenakew 2011 for a specific contemporary example.

5. See, for example, Wright’s post on the Stop the NT Intervention website, stoptheintervention.org/rda-new-legislation/comments/alexis-wright-author-4-2-10.

6. In this respect, Morton’s (white) hyperobjects can be seen as “beyond settler time,” to use Mark Rifkin’s formulation (2017). Rifkin’s work of that title explores how native concepts are forced into settler chronologies in ways that deform the very substance of those concepts.

7. I am aware of the rejections of resilience as a neoliberal tool for the governance and maintenance of the impoverished at the level of subjects and the “developing” state by Mark Neocleous (2013) and Sarah Bracke (2016). They reject it as it can be used to insist that the resilience of the poor and/or underserviced justifies the withdrawal of public-health and other services from those populations. This cannot be the case in my argument, as I am proposing that the very self-destruction of Aboriginal bodies counters their exploitation in Carpentaria, as the deeply ailing or dead body cannot work for the mines. For more on my choice of the term “persistence” in most contexts over “resistance” or “resilience,” see the introduction.

1. Mark Rifkin’s 2017 monograph Beyond Settler Time deals with precisely what it means to frame Aboriginal being without invoking settler chronology.