Dead as a Dodo

Overview

Wiped out by Dutch settlers less than a century after their arrival on Mauritius to establish a penal colony, the Dodo continues to live on as a disembodied signifier of its genocidal extermination. Dead As A Dodo lays bare the settler colonial mythology at the heart of the popular narrative of the Dodo’s extinction, drawing on archival material and in conversation with a book of poems titled A Theory of Birds by the Palestinian-American poet Zaina Alsous. Lines from this collection and a zoological study of the Dodo (1848) have been collaged into a cento to narrate the fictions (of race, name, and value) that enshrine settler colonial imaginaria over and above living in “co-dignity” with the land.