Expandability and expendability: reading the sacrifice zone

Abstract

ABSTRACT The ‘sacrifice zone’ as a concept and a form pervades contemporary literature and literary studies. The sacrifice zone is premised on expendability, on the idea that one part can be expended for the good of another, and yet, in the waning days of the Great Acceleration, expendability has proven to be remarkably expandable and the zone of sacrifice seems only to grow. At its heart, the sacrifice zone is a relational concept: it names a relation between the human and non–human world and among different human societies under various colonial regimes, a relation that has been fundamental to capitalist extractivism. The remainders of extractivism pervade our modes of perception, our bodies, and our ways of knowing, and in this sense the sacrifice zone is the medium of modern literature as well as of modern life itself. Undoing habits of simplification, diminishment, objectification, separation, and unidirectionality, and instead building habits for recognizing complexity, interdependency, immersiveness, and reciprocity, contemporary literature and art can be forces for repair in the face of the sacrifice zone.