“What happens if we assume that the female subject serves as a general case for explicating
social death, property relations, and the pained and putative constructions of blackness?
... What possibilities of resignification would then be possible?”
— Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection
In the department of Romance Studies at Duke University, I have engaged in a deeply transdisciplinary praxis of close reading, in which the hybrid texts of the Black Atlantic expand the disciplinary constraints of literature, history, and theory. My studies here have focused on Black Francophone cultural productions by and concerning women in the Caribbean, especially writers Maryse Condé, Marie-Célie Agnant, and Évelyne Trouillot, although their implications have a much broader scope. My research is dedicated to thinking of the work of “canonical” Afro-Caribbean thinkers—such as Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Édouard Glissant, Achille Mbembe and Françoise Vergès—in conversation with the brilliant interventions of Black Studies and Black feminist thought—such as Saidiya Hartman, Fred Moten, Hortense Spillers, and Christina Sharpe. I am particularly interested in the grammar of enunciations and speech acts produced in Black Atlantic literature as these writers work through the slave epistème as descriptive statement. My work is indebted to the traversals of literature, theory, and history in the works of Kaiama L. Glover, Annette Joseph-Gabriel, Dominique Aurélia, Renée Larrier, Zakiyyah Jackson, Alys Eve Weinbaum, and Sara Clarke Kaplan. Inspired by these scholars, I insist on reading the literature of the Black Atlantic as historical narratives and theoretical investigations into both material and immaterial embodiments of the slave episteme, of which resistance is first.
Before joining the Romance Studies department at Duke, I spent several years at New York University, earning a bachelor’s degree in French and Comparative Literature, a master’s degree in Comparative Literature, and a second master’s degree in French Studies, for the purpose of establishing a foundational framework for my future studies. Studying under the tutelage of Jean Michael Dash and Manthia Diawara, I concentrated on close readings of Négritude poetry by Césaire and Damas, followed by the post-Négritude works of Fanon and Glissant. By spending years immersed in these “canonical” texts, I developed a truly contextualized understanding of the textual and extratextual landscape of the Caribbean, before turning my attention to Black feminist critiques of Négritude and Créolité as well as the cultural productions of Black Caribbean women. This intellectual background continues to be critical to my ongoing research at Duke as well as my future academic goals.
My dissertation project, Monstrous Mothers: The Womb as Grammar in the Francophone Black Atlantic, interrogates the ways in which the “womb” haunts the archive of the Black Atlantic. Rooted in a rich corpus of Francophone literature, Black feminist thought, and political theories of the Global South, Monstrous Mothers explores the invocations of the womb as a site of destitution and agency—the structuring condition of the slave epistème and a discursive, material strategy of resistance—in the Francophone Black Atlantic. This project considers these critical works of literature (Maryse Condé’s Moi, Tituba sorcière... Noire de Salem; Marie-Célie Agnant’s Le Livre d’Emma; and Évelyne Trouillot’s Rosalie, l’infâme) as historiographic metafictions that question and expand the distinctions between history and literature, in order to examine the strategies of resistance and freedom to which they attest.
In the first chapter of Monstrous Mothers, I argue that, in Francophone Black Atlantic literature, infanticide (including self-induced abortion) constitutes an act of necroresistance and thus freedom against racialized biocapitalism, through a close reading of Maryse Condé’s iconic Moi, Tituba sorcière... Noire de Salem. Relying on the theoretical contributions of Frantz Fanon, Michel Foucault, Achille Mbembe, Banu Bargu, Tina Campt, and Kaiama Glover, I justify radical refusal as an act of resistance that seizes the means of reproducing the relations of production in a given power system, creating space for the development of counter-subjectivities. In the afterlife of partus sequitur ventrem and reproductive slavery, reading infanticide as an act of refusal to racial biocapitalism recognizes the lived experiences and complex counter-subjectivities to which the literature and history of the Black Atlantic confess. This chapter owes a great debt to the work of Alys Eve Weinbaum and Sara Clarke Kaplan.
In the second chapter of my dissertation project, I shift attention to the womb as its own grammar in the archive of the Black Atlantic, mobilizing Hortense Spiller’s much-cited reading of “female flesh ‘engendered’... [as] a praxis and a theory”[1]. By imagining Moi, Tituba in conversation with Marie-Célie Agnant’s Le Livre d’Emma, I seek to reclaim “the heritage of the [womb]” as both metaphor and material in this archive—as a primary structure through which slavery and its afterlives are envisaged and pronounced[2]. In this chapter, I chart descriptions of self-induced abortion and infanticide alongside the evocations of the womb in the theoretical world of the Black Atlantic: Édouard Glissant’s “boat [as] a womb, womb abyss”[3]; Christina Sharpe’s “[womb] in, and as, the hold”[4]; Françoise Vergès’ “mutilated history and... mutilated cartography” of the wombs of women[5]; and Saidiya Hartman’s “blood-stained gate”[6] among others. This chapter pays particular attention to the assemblage created through the overlapping valences of re(production) and labor in the epistème of racial biocapitalism.
In chapter three, I parse the concentric narratives that birthed Évelyne Trouillot’s Rosalie, l’infâme—the single paragraph that inspired Trouillot in Antilles 1789 : la Révolution aux Caraïbes; the surviving documents from this infamous case; and the work of literature she produced as a result. Together with Moi, Tituba and Le Livre d’Emma, this story establishes the grammar of the womb in Black Atlantic—a framework of intersectional and intersecting power relations, through which slavery and its afterlives take shape—while determining a pattern of non-biological kinship and reproduction that accompanies each evocation of the womb. Taking cue from Sylvia Wynter, I argue that alternate kinship formations and communication strategies queer the grammar of the womb, and as a result, de-biologize the slave epistème, moving away from the overrepresentation of the human and creating new frontiers from which to cogitate the self as/and other.
[1] Spillers, Hortense. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics 17:2, Summer 1987. 64-81. JSTOR.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Glissant, Edouard. Poetics of Relation. Translated by Betsy Wing. University of Michigan Press, 2009.
[4] Sharpe, Christina. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Duke University Press, 2016.
[5] Vergès, Françoise. The Wombs of Women: Race, Capital, Feminism. Translated by Kaiama Glover. Duke University Press, 2020.
[6] Hartman, Saidiya V. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. W. W. Norton & Co, 2022.