Speculative Aetiology in Namwali Serpell’s The Old Drift: Towards a Decolonial Critique of History and Human

Abstract

Namwali Serpell’s The Old Drift (2019) yokes together human, technological and ecological shifts in a sinister speculative register. While it seemingly corresponds to the posthuman Gothic, this framing is insufficient to describe gothic presentations of the postcolony where people are treated as inhuman surplus. Posthumanist approaches risk reinscribing the dehumanizing discourses that sustain coloniality as a social and environmental organization. The novel presents a two-fold decolonial critique. First, it irreverently rehearses Eurocentric Zambian history and the gothic tropes that enlivened it, only to decentre this account for a decolonial aetiology voiced by a mosquito hive mind. Second, given that history is a story of how the ‘human’ came to be, the figures of biological excess unsettle the colonial category ‘human.’ These interwoven strands of decolonial critique unseat colonial evolutionary teleology in favour of a plural, multispecies aetiology, best read through a decolonial ecoGothic lens that exposes coloniality as both an ecological and social project.