The ice within you: Sovereign impunity, unreadability, and the archive of November 1984

Abstract

ABSTRACT Jaspreet Singh's Helium, a novel concerning 1984's anti-Sikh pogroms, seeks to archive the impunity on which sovereignty is based. This basis remains indelible. Impunity's unconscionability contaminates conscience as we know it and as it allows us to know. The cruelty that imbues impunity impacts all social formations and compromises our ethics and politics in practice and in theory as we practice it. At stake in reading sovereign impunity, then, is its very readability. It may be unreadable or readable as unreadable. Fathoming how we are marked by what we resist, Singh writes about the (un)readable in the archive of 1984.