(Re)Animating Black-Native Life in M. Carmen Lane’s Calling Out After Slaughter
Morgan L. Ridgway | Harvard University
___________________________________________
DOI: https://doi.org/10.71106/RDRR2005
Publication: Volume 6 Issue 4
Abstract | Part of how the settler state replicates its power is through managing the conditions and possibilities for life—past, present, and future. The body is a critical part of this biosocial power, and the possibilities for the Black-Native body reveals how settler colonialism materially and discursively orders life. Through M. Carmen Lane’s Calling Out After Slaughter I argue the settler state assigns Black-Native life a non-living status and I consider how an Indigenous poetics reinvigorates Black-Native life through a critical practice of mourning, love, and care. I argue that Lane mobilizes an Indigenous poetics to generate a liberatory future for Black-Native people in the aftermath of settler colonial terror. Of particular focus are the ways M. Carmen Lane generates a poetics that resists the colonial ordering of the past and present. In excavating the aspects of Black-Native life that have been buried, disfigured, or misremembered, Calling Out After Slaughter becomes a textual space that makes material Black-Native people. Lane’s development of an Indigenous poetics becomes a method of refusal of the settler colonial state that continues to deny or diminish Black-Native life. In the process, Calling Out After Slaughter makes another world more available to our imaginations through the witnessing, reflection, and healing of the past, making way for the reassembly of Black-Native life.
Keywords | Settler Colonialism, Textual Dismemberment, Material Destruction, Decoloniality, Black-Native Life, Mourning, Indigenous Poetics, Embodiment, Re-membering, Biosociality, Calling Out After Slaughter, M. Carmen Lane
Morgan L. Ridgway (ridgway.mor@gmail.com) is a writer and independent scholar concerned with the conditions of Black-Native life. They hold a PhD in History and certification in Native American and Indigenous Studies from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, USA. Their research examines the intersection of urban Indigenous politics, Indigenous poetics, performance, and the systems of biopower that structure Black and Indigenous life in the United States. Recently, they were a Lecturer in History and Literature at Harvard University, USA.
MLA Citation for this Article:
Ridgway, Morgan L. “(Re)Animating Black-Native Life in M. Carmen Lane’s Calling Out After Slaughter.” Language, Literature, and Interdisciplinary Studies, vol. 6, no. 4, 10 Apr. 2026, pp. 2.21–2.35, https://doi.org/10.71106/RDRR2005
.