Fragmenting, Repeating, Rebuilding: The Chaotic Cyclones of Gisèle Pineau’s L’Espérance-macadam

This article explores the creative potential of the repeating cyclones at the heart of Gisèle Pineau’s 1995 novel L’Espérance-macadam. Examining the novel in relation to Édouard Glissant’s chaos-monde, it understands the cyclone not simply as catastrophe but also as an ambiguous agent of chaos in line with Glissant’s key metaphor of the slave ship, capable of both destroying and building anew a community through violent cycles of unearthing, fragmenting and interweaving. Engaging with previous critical readings of Pineau’s cyclonic figures that have relied on Freud’s “repetition compulsion”, this article argues that Pineau’s representation of external and internal repetitive events—natural disasters and personal traumas—are not to be read as regression or stasis, but as the possibility of incremental progress through constant movement and towards what Pineau names an “espérance-macadam”. Repetition thus becomes a catalyst for systemic change, allowing her protagonist to process trauma, join a community of survivors of sexual abuse and environmental injustice and find agency within and through the cyclonic events that affect her community.

In the Waste: On Blackness and (Being) Plastic

“In the Waste: On Blackness and (Being) Plastic” is an homage and response to Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Sharpe proposes wake work as an analytic to methodologically reorient Black living in the afterlife of slavery, a “past that is not yet past.” Waste work here enters to explore the continuities of slave ships and plantations, genocidal clearings, toxic wastes, objects, and disposable bodies, providing an opening to re/consider the relationship between Blackness, animals and (other) abjects, namely plastic. If abjects can co-conspire in one another’s disposability, how can these fraught relations of ejection be reconfigured on new terms? By tending to the multifold deaths and disposals that exist along the subject-eject-object continuum in the wake of the slave ship and the extractive, settler colonial state, I argue that otherwise ways of living and dying emerge beyond the linear ecocidal model, perhaps ones that refuse disposability altogether.

Quare Times: An Introduction to a Queer Perspective on Afrofuturism and a Reading of Sun Ra’s Space Is the Place

The film Space Is the Place (1974), directed by John Coney, stars Sun Ra who was also co-author of the script. This chapter explores Sun Ra’s Afrofuturism as shown in the film, bringing it into relation with José Muñoz’s notion of a queer future. Rather than focusing on Sun Ra’s sexuality, this chapter argues that his quareness (E. Patrick Johnson’s useful term drawn from African American vernacular) emerges in the sonic and performative aspects of his work. Sun Ra’s spaceship offers a future-oriented response to the slave ship and Middle Passage (as described by Paul Gilroy) and to the limitations of the here and now. The notion of assemblage (Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari) articulates the quareness of Sun Ra’s collective improvisational practices.

Introduction

Ship of fools. Death ship, ark, ghost ship, slave ship, clipper, warship. Factory ship, trawler, galley, hulk. Lighter and collier and tug, aircraft carrier and tanker, container ship and banana boat. Dhow, pinnace, trireme, felucca, knar. Galleon, dugout, tramp steamer, raft. Argo, Dawn Treader, Flying Dutchman, Pequod, Kon-Tiki...

The Dutch Slave Trade in the Atlantic, 1600–1800

The Dutch share in the Atlantic slave trade averaged about 5 to 6 percent of the total, but the volume differed sharply over time. The beginning of the Dutch transatlantic slave trade can be dated to 1636, after the Dutch West India Company (WIC) had acquired its own plantation colony around Recife in Brazil. In order to set up a regular trade in slaves, the WIC also took Elmina on the Gold Coast and Luanda in Angola from the Portuguese. The slave trade to Dutch Brazil was short-lived, and after the loss of Dutch Brazil and Luanda, the WIC as well as private merchants from Amsterdam started to sell slaves to colonists in the Spanish, English, and French Caribbean via Curaçao, the WIC trade hub in the region. In 1667, in addition to the small colonies of Berbice and Essequibo, the Dutch conquered Suriname and during the 18th century established Demerara. The Dutch slave trade became more and more focused on these plantation colonies. Between 1700 and 1725, after the Dutch had been banned from selling slaves in foreign colonies, the Dutch slave trade declined, but the volume increased again after 1730 when the WIC lost its monopoly and private shipping companies were allowed to enter the trade. In addition, Amsterdam-based investors poured money into the Dutch plantation colonies expecting windfall profits from a new cash crop: coffee. These profits did not materialize, and the majority of the planters in the Dutch plantation colonies went bankrupt. These bankruptcies, another war with Britain, and the French occupation caused the Dutch slave trade to decline sharply. The last Dutch slave ship sailed to Suriname in 1802. In 1814, the Dutch government yielded to British abolitionist pressure and abolished the slave trade in the hope of regaining its colonial possessions occupied by Britain.