Death-worlds and necropolitics of abjection in Emma Donoghue’s

Abstract

Reading Emma Donoghue’s short story ‘Counting the Days’ as a text that inscribes the Irish passage in TransCanadian literature,1 this chapter will focus on the cross- border transit from Ireland to Canada depicted in the story as responding to forces operating in the long history of globalization. Mobility forced by financial debt and the risk of starvation in the mid- nineteenth- century Irish context is a form of necropolitics: the bodies crossing the pathogeographic space of the Atlantic face physical and emotional risks, and economic refugees remain perilously marginalized upon arrival in their new society. With recourse to affect theories, this chapter will examine how Donoghue brings to the forefront the necropolitics of both old and current biocapitalism, how abjection produces anger and how this anger materializes in cholera and ultimately in death.