Billy-Ray Belcourt's loneliness as the affective life of settler colonialism

Abstract

This article explores loneliness as the affective life of settler colonialism through the work of queer Indigenous (Driftpile Cree) writer Billy-Ray Belcourt's two volumes of poetry This Wound Is a World and NDN Coping Mechanisms. In particular, the article focuses on how Belcourt draws on queer affect theory and critical race theory in the work of scholars such as Jose Muñoz, Leo Bersani, Lauren Berlant, Ann Cvetkovich, Saidiya Hartman and Christina Sharpe – as he explores the relation between sex and death, and between cruising cultures and the ongoing genocide of Indigenous peoples. It argues that Belcourt's innovative fusion of poetry and theory provides new genres for racialised understandings of loneliness and other structures of feeling.