"Lives of Tense Coordination": Swarming and the Scales of the Human

The Old Drift’s oscillations between swarms as collectives and as singularities invite us to address how the scalar turn has shaped narrative representations of human life. Building on Haraway’s concept of situated knowledge, an embodied objectivity that is attentive to technological mediations of scale, and Vehlken’s media theoretical account of vanishing technological intervention in swarm discourse, I show how Serpell’s novel stages women’s alienated experience as colonial subjects as an occasion for an interface between insect and human life even as it ultimately fails to articulate either a collective or a singular subject.