NECROPOLITICAL PARALYSIS: COLONIAL DEATH-WORLDS AND CONSTRAINED AGENCY IN LES BLANCS

Abstract [English]

Les Blancs (1970) by Lorraine Hansberry offers a compelling exploration of the violent structures underlying colonial power and their impact on indigenous life and subjectivity. Through the lens of Achille Mbembe’s theory of necropolitics, this study examines how the play reconfigures colonialism as a regime governed not merely by authority or ideology, but by the systematic management of life and death. The analysis focuses on key elements such as missionary intervention, racial dehumanization, militarized authority, and colonial education to reveal how these forces operate as interconnected mechanisms that sustain a necropolitical order. Central to this reading is the construction of the colonial space as a “death-world,” where indigenous populations are subjected to conditions of extreme precarity and reduced to states of living death. The play’s portrayal of racial hierarchies and linguistic violence highlights the ways in which colonial discourse legitimizes disposability and normalizes brutality. Major Rice emerges as the embodiment of sovereign violence, through whom colonial authority is enacted via the regulation of life and death. By foregrounding the psychological and existential dimensions of colonial domination, this study also examines the central character, Tshembe Matoseh, whose internal conflict reflects a condition that may be understood as necropolitical paralysis, wherein agency is constrained within a system that renders all choices ethically and materially compromised. Ultimately, this paper argues that Les Blancs not only critiques colonial violence but also exposes the structural logic through which power operates by producing and sustaining conditions of death.