‘Melancholy is a utopian feeling:’ affect as antidote to the bionecropolitics of settler colonialism in Billy-Ray Belcourt’s poetry

This article takes up settler colonialism in Canada as operating within a ‘bionecropolitical’ structure, the main aim of which is the possession of land. The structure excludes-yet-retains Indigenous peoples toward that aim, absorbing into state-sanctioned institutional processes what can reify its legitimacy, and rejecting whatever threatens it. One method for achieving this is moralizing discourses, which frame Indigenous resistance as a danger to the nation. These discourses exclude-yet-retain Indigenous claims to sovereignty, epistemologies and ontologies, but also emotional affective responses to a history of colonial violence. Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission exemplifies how settler institutions contain and moralize Indigenous trauma within a sanitized framework to absolve the settler state and moralize it against contestations and their affective bases that are inconvenient, unintelligible, and delegitimizing to the state. Within settler colonialism’s fragile imaginary, affects that threaten the national image of reconciliation and chronological progression from the country’s colonial past are actively undermined and characterized as a threat to peace and cohesion. Billy-Ray Belcourt’s poetry disrupts this epistemological order by foregrounding unintelligible affects– such as grief and melancholy—offering the possibility of queer Indigenous futurity. A To conclude, the article offers an epistemological shift toward ‘not-knowing’ from the theoretical coalitions between queer of color theory and Indigenous thought proposed in the work of Belcourt and Jodi Byrd.