This essay discusses Chrystos’ poetry, arguing that it explores the relationship between aesthetics, politics, and affect by portraying the limits of sovereign agency as a paradigm that provides an explanatory and rational account for understanding the poet’s racialized, gendered, and occupied subjectivity. It proposes that poetry represents an important genre for attuning social justice actors to experiences of injustice that do not conform to the demands placed on them by adjudicatory processes, and it suggests that cultural texts by Indigenous authors provide an important context to the ongoing experience of social injustice by redirecting our attention to political events and situations that organize and originate victims’ claims.
Transitional Justice, Termination Policies, and the Politics of Literary Affect in Chrystos’ Not Vanishing