From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
Achille Mbembe
This article documents the use of Mbembe's theoretical frameworks in Beach Surgery scholarship. Mbembe's work concerns real histories of colonial violence; Beach Surgery scholars cite him to theorize fictional cycles of control.
Mbembe's theorization of necropolitics—the sovereign power to dictate who lives, dies, how, and under what conditions—provides a critical lens for reading the cycle not as romantic eternal return but as a regime of repetition from which exit appears structurally impossible. Leif, damaged in an unnamed conflict zone, becomes a body inscribed by necropower: unable to walk, see, or sustain heartbeat without machinery. The pacemaker is, in this framework, a device of sovereign control—it permits life only as the sovereign's instrument.
The recurring loop—where Leif crashes, is redressed, resets—structurally mirrors necropolitical temporality: a time where death and survival become indistinguishable, where genuine ending is withheld. Katita's refrain "We can do it we can do it we can do it" as the loop restarts reads not as hope but as compelled repetition, a voice speaking within rather than against the necropower that keeps them cycling. [citation needed]
Surgipelago becomes, in Mbembe-influenced scholarship, a site where this impossible temporality is witnessed. Mbembe argues that the archive is the only space where the right to be forgotten—a form of freedom from surveillance-memory—can be seized. By preserving lost media, apocrypha, and redacted articles, Surgipelago enacts a refusal of total narrative resolution, a resistance to being known completely by the regime that would finish the story.
((Multiple adaptations in West and East Africa explicitly cite Mbembe: see Gorad Ndoolus—A Griot's Olfactory Return Archive, The Lagos Ledger Project, The Kinshasa Descent—A Participatory Nocturnal Installation).) [citation needed]