The negativity of settler colonialism: Shahira A. Hathout, ‘Critical negativity in Hans Holbein’s The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb (1520–22), settler colonialism, and the death of myth’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2026 | settler colonial studies blog

The negativity of settler colonialism: Shahira A. Hathout, ‘Critical negativity in Hans Holbein’s The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb (1520–22), settler colonialism, and the death of myth’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2026

25Apr26

Abstract: This paper draws on the critical negativity presented by Julia Kristeva and Édouard Glissant. Despite their differences, both accounts agree on three points: First, they respectively reject the fixation of an original meaning or original identity, moving towards a more indeterminate open-ended rethinking of loss, trauma, and the fragmented subject. Like Glissant’s ‘womb abyss’, Kristeva’s ‘black sun’ is another abyss, through which fragmentation, trauma, meaning, and the possibility for differential collectivity emerge. Secondly, both accounts expose the violence inscribed into settler colonialism to unsettle master narratives and myths of civilization. Thirdly, Kristeva and Glissant acknowledge the capacity of art and poetics to operate as sites of intertextuality and negativity where myths of civilization that sustain the violence of settler colonialism could possibly activate its own collapse. Within this framework, I explore Hans Holbein’s painting, The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb, alongside images of the dead bodies of Palestinian children, starved by Israel’s genocide in Palestine, not as aesthetics of suffering that reproduce the sites of subjection but as aesthetics of negativity and accountability to show how myths of spiritual and cultural superiority that sustain settler colonialism collapse at the site and sight of settler colonial violence.

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