The construction of the states of the Global South rests on an urgent question: upon what forms of violence did they build their prosperity? The extermination, enslavement, and silencing of Indigenous peoples run through the national narratives explored by J. M. Coetzee and F. M. Siccardi, tracing an unprecedented line of South-South reflection. Blurring the lines between essay and literature, the authors interweave personal memories and historical narratives that challenge the heroic accounts of national founding and restore the voices of those who have been erased.

Coetzee examines the violence perpetrated against the Khoi and San peoples in South Africa, the genocide carried out by the German Empire in Namibia in the early 20th century, and the systematic persecution of Australia’s Aboriginal peoples. Siccardi traces the history of colonial violence in the Argentine Pampas and Patagonia, from the mid-18th century to the so-called Conquest of the Desert, and shows how the state and its imaginaries were forged on the exclusion of Indigenous peoples.

Evil Savage lays bare the colonial past of the Global South and the violence that continues to shape the present