THE AESTHETICS OF DISIDENTIFICATION: POSTCOLONIAL MELANCHOLIA AND QUEER FUTURITY IN NATASHA BROWN’S ASSEMBLY

Abstract

In Assembly, Britain’s unresolved colonial wound festers, erupting in forms of melancholia that contaminate the social fabric. The novel’s fragmentation does not merely reflect aesthetic experimentation; it is the very symptom of a fractured subjectivity, one compelled to negotiate the violence of historical amnesia. The narrator moves through elite institutions like a ghost condemned to wear a mask, and yet she transforms this mask into a weapon. By disidentifying, she exposes the absurd theatre of empire’s afterlife and insists on another temporality—one that refuses the stasis of melancholic repetition. Brown’s text thereby stages the confrontation between the pathology of empire and the insurgent energies of refusal, offering literature itself as a terrain of decolonial struggle.