Root words: Zora Neale Hurston's and Patrick Chamoiseau's scenes of biopolitical violence

Zora Neale Hurston and Patrick Chamoiseau write from the US and Martinique respectively, but their fiction demonstrates that the experience of slave-descendant populations across time and space bears the mark of biopolitical violence. Missing from the volumes of scholarship on these authors is a consideration of the way the afterlife of racial slavery attaches a durable and negative liminality to black existence in their fiction. This thesis explores Hurston's and Chamoiseau's narrativization of the ways biopolitical violence holds slave-descendant populations in the indefinite space between the human and animal, citizen and non-citizen, and life and death in the post-Emancipation context.