Drone, Baby, Drone: Techno-neocolonialism and Postcolonial Mediations in Namwali Serpell’s The Old Drift

ABSTRACT: The Old Drift embodies Namwali Serpell’s ideas of colonialism and post-colonialism as unstable descriptors requiring an imaginative retelling of Zambian national history, an alternate centering of marginalized figures, and a critical assessing of social protest in a society saturated with digital technologies. The paper examines how error, chance, and contingency determine the geographic, biologic, and gendered dynamics of empire, ideology, and subaltern resistance. It argues that the novel dramatizes techno-neocolonialism as the nexus of information technology, government agencies, and international businesses that generate conditions of subalternity for peoples deemed as threats or superfluous to the social order sustained by the postcolonial State. The novel foregrounds the politics of popular protest in Zambia as the drift of postcolonial mediations—imprinted with violence, haunted by imperialism, shaped by postcolonial contradictions, influenced by natural environments, crusted over with contingency, and re-narrated with subaltern agency.