Neocolonial deployments of grievability in Sarah Maria Griffin’s Spare and Found Parts

This article explores the effects of decontextualised history and colonisation through geographic space and place, which serve to create systems of diminishing grievability in Sarah Maria Griffin’s Spare and Found Parts (2016). Foundationally, I use Judith Butler’s concept of grievability as a metric for determining perceived value based on class, labour, and location. The novel takes place in a once-grand city (recognisable to readers as Dublin) in a near-future Ireland where advanced technology is essentially outlawed. In the world of the text, bodily difference determines one’s quality of life and is the basis of class hierarchies and allocations of arable land. On the surface, the novel examines disability, technophobia, and a young woman’s search for belonging, but the underlying discourses of class and labour demonstrate how hierarchies of grievability and life value are fundamentally rooted in colonial history and invested in the perpetuation of neocolonial futures. In addition to assessing the ableist rhetoric, which maintains divisions in the text, I turn to scholars of Irish history and culture to demonstrate the methods by which decontextualised histories enable the creation of neocolonial hierarchies of value.