On Necropolitics and the Precarious Border Subject

Abstract: This essay situates a geopolitical and biopolitical reading of Mexican author Sara Uribe’s play Antígona González (2012). In this reenvisioning of the 441 BCE Sophocles tragedy Antigone , Uribe’s work articulates the often unknowable and invisible violences enacted upon il/legible bodies across the Americas—more specifically, in Tamaulipas, Mexico. The text considers how los muertos y los desaparecidos , the murdered and the disappeared, dislocate Latine literary studies away from a singular US-Mexico geo-point and toward a transnational biopolitic. By relocating the urgency back onto the disembodiment of those outside of a legible border subjectivity and nameable nationalism, Uribe’s work marks a possibility for how we might reposition the border as both unstable and unnecessary within a humanitarian crisis. The essay also considers how form, genre, and translation inform an active reading that decenters Antígona as “hero” and centers the precarity and dispossession of undocumented lives in the twenty-first century.