‘I reject this life’: Destituent Power and Affective Crisis in Natasha Brown’s Assembly and Simone Atangana Bekono’s Confrontations

Through a reading of the novels Assembly by the British writer Natasha Brown and Confrontations by the Dutch author Simone Atangana Bekono, this essay will discuss the relation between contemporary literature and the political imagination in terms of destituent power. Political resistance is commonly understood in terms of a constituent power that aims to create a new political order. In contrast, destituent power aims to desert or destroy the existing order without demanding or (re)presenting a different one. In both novels the female and black protagonists are seemingly successful by being included in prestigious institutions, yet the repetition of micro-aggression and /or outright racist bullying makes them feel exhausted and excluded. Both novels do not end with the imagination of a political horizon but nevertheless form instances of liberation even if that means one’s own death ( Assembly) or an ongoing confrontation ( Confrontations). It is in this aim to leave behind and reject the current racialized order that the novels can be understood as destituent.