Abstract
To rethink history from the perspective of an economy of affects as they are engendered by beings ousted from the definition of the human, I will draw on two Caribbean texts, Anim-Addo's Imoinda: Or She Who will Lose Her Name and Philip's Zong!. This essay discusses how these two Caribbean texts counterwrite the history of the slave plantation by staging and embodying the work of what I call an affective memory drawn from the history of the black subject as a history of absence and reconstellated in the present as a history of being and community. This affective memory represents the being of the ‘living corpse’ and her making of a community as the subject of a new polity, the polity of decolonised beings. By drawing on these texts to demonstrate how they write the history of spectres, ruins and other communities, I discuss affective memory not as the absolute possession of a body, but rather as the alienated property of the body that can be reclaimed only by a community that, precarious and tentative as it is for it is a community of slaves and subjected bodies, remains the only promise for the future.
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Notes
Imoinda was first published in English and Italian in a bilingual edition edited by Covi (2003a). See also the special issue of New Mango Season: A Journal of Caribbean Women's Writing on Imoinda.
Regarding the Zong tragedy, Philip states that 150 Africans were murdered by ‘deliberate drowning’ (2008: 191); in his exhaustive study of the same event, Baucom refers to ‘one hundred thirty-three slaves thrown overboard’ and ‘one hundred thirty-two human being drowned’ (2005: 133). The discrepancy between the numbers shows the cryptic nature of the archive of slavery, the difficulty of historical accuracy and the questions of material evidence and the politics of representation involved in the writing and interpretation of the history of the slave trade. But, in Baucom's beautiful words, the event ‘is there’ and is ‘one event’: ‘The text guards its secrets even as it demands that we listen to them over and over and over again’ (2005: 133).
Covi (2003b) offers a powerful analysis of the politics of Imoinda. See also Anim-Addo (2003) on the significance of rewriting Behn's text in the present age.
Compare, for instance, Zong! #8, #9 and #11 with the unnumbered poems that follow in the ‘Dicta’ supplement, and the way the poetic text expands and dilates until it explodes into syllables in the last three sections.
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Acknowledgements
Dedicated to Giovanna Covi for her insistence on doing feminist politics otherwise.
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Karavanta, M. the injunctions of the spectre of slavery: affective memory and the counterwriting of community. Fem Rev 104, 42–60 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1057/fr.2013.4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/fr.2013.4