Political killings in the contemporary world: Sizwe Bansi is Dead through biopolitical lenses

Abstract

This essay offers a reading of South African Anglophone play, Sizwe Bansi is Dead, through biopolitical lenses, with a view to shedding light on dis-embodied political killings prompted by racism in the contemporary world, and to interrogating the means by which these murders are recurrently restructured and justified. Although the play is under the spotlight of scholarly attention, it is scarcely read through biopolitical lenses, especially through Frantz Fanon, Michel Foucault, Ann Laura Stoler and Achille Mbembe’s perspectives related to racism and political death, and by alluding to its significance for the contemporary society. This is where this article departs from the existing scholarship.