Specters of Minks: Postcapitalist Elegies and Multispecies Solidarities

Abstract

While narrative approaches in International Relations (IR) have become increasingly prominent, posthumanist narratives of capitalism remain on the margins. Informed by feminist avant-garde poet Susan Howe and philosopher Jacques Derrida, I develop a ‘drift narrative’ approach to human-mink relations during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, wherein millions of minks in fur farms were infected by the coronavirus and culled. This approach employs the use of postcapitalist elegies constructed in a wildlife refuge located near a mink factory farm. In a context of global mink culls, the wildlife refuge – where minks live freely – proximate to a local industrial mink fur farm – where minks are caged and killed for profit – became the site of (re)writing IR in drift narrative form. This poetic analysis highlights trans-spatial links of animal capital and employs intermixed elegiac images, sound recordings, and textual fragments to help us become attuned to nonhuman dreams, desires, losses, and futures. Grounding persistence for postcapitalist futures within the dreams of the dead, the drift narrative generates a spectral form of global multispecies solidarity. Contributing to the interspecies and narrative turns in IR, as well as multidisciplinary work on multispecies solidarity, the drift narrative offers an aesthetic and ethical critique of past and future animal capital systems that render more-than-human life as killable.