This essay reads Guadeloupean novelist Simone Schwartz-Bart’s Pluie et vent sur Télumée miracle (... more This essay reads Guadeloupean novelist Simone Schwartz-Bart’s Pluie et vent sur Télumée miracle (The Bridge of Beyond), positioning the novel as a vital archive for decolonizing the so-called ontological turn. In addition to narrativizing the stakes of disavowing the human, the novel situates gendered embodiment at the heart of these concerns, asking whether a movement toward the nonanthropocentric subject is always a movement away from how gender matters, and, significantly, how gender matters alongside race.
Suzanne Césaire’s essays for the Martinican journal Tropiques (1941– 1945) provide a necessary i... more Suzanne Césaire’s essays for the Martinican journal Tropiques (1941– 1945) provide a necessary intervention into current discussions of the posthuman, feminist new materialism, and the Anthropocene. Her modernist aesthetics, influenced by the Négritude movement, demand that the Caribbean be understood as more than a site of enslavement and ecological devastation. I argue that Césaire’s essays radically deviate from Enlightenment ideals of what constitutes human life, experimentally deploying a figure called the homme-plante as an alternative more-than-human ontology that are significant for postcolonial theoretical concepts like Achille Mbembe’s necropolitics. Following Sylvia Wynter’s theorization of various “genres of the human” and speaking to contemporary anxieties about the universalizing tendencies of the Anthropocene, I consider how Césaire’s work theorizes more-than- human genres and geologic agency. Césaire illustrates the fraught, weaponized nature of the human qua subject while offering a capacious, trans-corporeal form of life that combines human and plant life with geologic agency in opposition to a colonial legacy of human and non-human violence. As such, Césaire’s essays stage a necessary dialogue between postcolonial studies and ecocriticism.
This essay reads Guadeloupean novelist Simone Schwartz-Bart’s Pluie et vent sur Télumée miracle (... more This essay reads Guadeloupean novelist Simone Schwartz-Bart’s Pluie et vent sur Télumée miracle (The Bridge of Beyond), positioning the novel as a vital archive for decolonizing the so-called ontological turn. In addition to narrativizing the stakes of disavowing the human, the novel situates gendered embodiment at the heart of these concerns, asking whether a movement toward the nonanthropocentric subject is always a movement away from how gender matters, and, significantly, how gender matters alongside race.
Suzanne Césaire’s essays for the Martinican journal Tropiques (1941– 1945) provide a necessary i... more Suzanne Césaire’s essays for the Martinican journal Tropiques (1941– 1945) provide a necessary intervention into current discussions of the posthuman, feminist new materialism, and the Anthropocene. Her modernist aesthetics, influenced by the Négritude movement, demand that the Caribbean be understood as more than a site of enslavement and ecological devastation. I argue that Césaire’s essays radically deviate from Enlightenment ideals of what constitutes human life, experimentally deploying a figure called the homme-plante as an alternative more-than-human ontology that are significant for postcolonial theoretical concepts like Achille Mbembe’s necropolitics. Following Sylvia Wynter’s theorization of various “genres of the human” and speaking to contemporary anxieties about the universalizing tendencies of the Anthropocene, I consider how Césaire’s work theorizes more-than- human genres and geologic agency. Césaire illustrates the fraught, weaponized nature of the human qua subject while offering a capacious, trans-corporeal form of life that combines human and plant life with geologic agency in opposition to a colonial legacy of human and non-human violence. As such, Césaire’s essays stage a necessary dialogue between postcolonial studies and ecocriticism.
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Papers by Lauren Nelson