Female Agency in the Caribbean Afterlives of Slavery

Esteves-Wolff, Cristina; Esteves-Wolff, Cristina

This panel explores literary iterations of female agency as an afterlife of slavery in the Caribbean. For our purposes, afterlives refer to the structures and legacies of slavery and empire that persist along matrices of race, gender, class, and sovereignty. In thinking through the trajectory of these legacies, scholars have routinely taken us back to the site of the mother. Christina Sharpe has described the experience of living in the afterlife of slavery as follows: “Living in/the wake of slavery is living “the afterlife of property” and living the afterlife of partus sequitur ventrem (that which is brought forth follows the womb), in which the Black child inherits the non/status, the non/being of the mother.” This panel, thinking alongside scholars such as Christina Sharpe and Saidiya Hartman, centers the feminine and the intimate in its exploration of the enduring reverberations of slavery, colonialism, and empire in the Caribbean. These literary representations of women—as revolutionary figure, as haunting presence, as abject mother—illuminate their tormented legacy, bearing the onus of a particular imbrication of race and gender that shapes the lives of Black women. The presenters of this panel turn our attention to the site of fiction, where Caribbean writers use female protagonists to engage with the possibilities of agency and survival in a post-abolition world. Our panel will begin with a 10 minute introduction regarding the state of the field and the questions we look to dialogue with during our session. This will be followed by 15 minute presentations for each panelist, concluding with a 20 minute discussion and Q&A with the public.

Our first presenter, Lucy Swanson, considers the place of women in the Haitian Revolution’s historical archive. Long seen as a political event marked by the efforts of Haitian men, such as Toussaint Louverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Jean d’Amérique’s play Opéra poussière (Haiti, 2021) recounts the haunting return of oft-forgotten Haitian revolutionary leader, Sanité Bélair. Swanson’s presentation, in considering the omission of female resistance in narratives of revolutionary action, speaks to urgent contemporary issues regarding the impacts slavery and colonialism have had on women and their larger representation within the national imaginary. Swanson then further complicates this reading by asking us to consider how these feminine figures are then reappropriated and figuratively mobilized in service of regimes tied to imperial power. Swanson’s nuanced exploration of Sanité Bélair’s place (or lack thereof) in the cultural imaginary will attend to important questions regarding female agency in post-revolutionary Haiti.

Our second presenter, Mark Deggan, analyzes Simone Schwarz-Bart’s Pluie et vent sur Télumée Miracle (Guadeloupe, 1972) and René Depestre’s Hadriana dans Tous mes Rêves (Haiti, 1988) to address the agency of female characters whose memories embody a colonial or postcolonial legacy, thus gendering a “haunting” that manifests in fiction. In both novels, the inescapability of slavery’s reverberations in the Caribbean invites us to think of its atemporality wherein “all of us are still suffering and dying of slavery [even] after it is finished or forgotten” (Schwarz-Bart).” By exploring the historical challenges of female survival, Deegan examines how the afterlives of the undying “dead” are manifested through the heroines of the two novels, who are found to have greater agency in the afterlife than in the everyday.

Finally, presenter Nasanin Rosado explores the archetype of the monstrous, abject mother prevalent in Black Atlantic cultural production through Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory (US, 1994). If Caribbean literature reveals the womb as a site of deformation that produces capital rather than babies, Rosado highlights this as an afterlife of the slave trade. Danticat’s protagonist is the result of a violent rape that “haunts” the narrator’s relationship to her mother, thus facilitating a theorization of the possibilities of agency found in the abject mother: a refusal to reproduce and care for offspring as the ultimate form of resistance.

Our participants represent a diversity of voices across academic ranks. The panel seeks to engage scholars of the French Caribbean with our own expertise in the Spanish Caribbean, fostering a comparative approach to Antillean literary studies of slavery. We hope this panel fosters a critical dialogue that reflects on the present resonances of the cruel institution that transported millions of diasporic Africans across the Atlantic. In centering these legacies as they are represented in Caribbean literature—particularly as they are activated through the lens of gender—our panel endeavors to illuminate how literary processes touch on the intersections of gender, race, and colonialism in order to narrativize and complicate our shared understandings of Caribbean afterlives.

650A Female Agency in the Caribbean Afterlives of Slavery: Calls for Papers