The empire writes back and then looks away: on the necropolitics of Orwell’s ‘Marrakech’

This article challenges the common reading of George Orwell’s ‘Marrakech’ as a humanitarian critique of empire. It argues, instead, that the essay functions as a literary apparatus of necropolitical management, one that aestheticizes colonial death, neutralises suffering, and renders the colonised body ungrievable. Orwell’s prose does not resist imperial violence; it absorbs it, stylises it, and makes it atmospherically tolerable. Through Achille Mbembe’s concept of necropower, Christina Sharpe’s theory of the wake, and Ariella Azoulay’s critique of the imperial shutter, the article reveals how the essay organises disappearance while appearing to observe it. The skeletal poor, the labouring woman, the discarded donkey, these figures do not interrupt the colonial order; they sustain it. Close reading is used here not simply as a method, but as a political and ethical practice, attuned to the quiet ways prose organises disappearance. This article provides, to my knowledge, the first sustained necropolitical reading of ‘Marrakech.’ It contributes to ongoing debates in postcolonial and literary studies by foregrounding the role of form in the normalisation of violence, and by showing that literature’s complicity with empire is not incidental, but foundational.