Ever since French-speaking settlers called it “La Nouvelle-Orléans,” and especially since English-speaking settlers renamed it “New Orleans,” the city at the mouth of the Mississippi River has divided and defined the American landmasses, the Caribbean islands, and the waters in between. For much of the eighteenth century, the city was one of the preeminent places where enslaved Africans became African Americans—a so-called “market” where human beings were placed under a yoke of white supremacy that tried to fashion them as nonhuman possessions. But at every point, the city has also been an ecology of abolition—a site at which Blackened peoples fought for freedom, whether against the older institutions of enslavement or the newer institutions of incarceration; a site in which Indigenous peoples have persisted despite rumors of their destruction; and a site at which the many communities of the Caribbean have come together to imagine resilient ways of living and dying on our precarious planet.

The papers gathered here explore these fertile terrains—these “ecologies of enslavement, ecologies of abolition.

Giovanna Montenegro will begin with “Saamaka in the Rainforest: Resistance and Cultural Memory.” Sharing research she completed during a Fulbright to Suriname, Montenegro will pierce through stereotypes spread by Surinamese creole writers from the coast, Moravian missionaries, and others, showing how the Saamaka maroons of Suriname have been dependent on their forest environment first, for their freedom, and, now for their sustenance and cultural practices. Focusing on the Saamaka woodcarving collective, Totomboti, and their Saamaka museum, which from the village of Pikin Slee creates art meant to resist against ecocide. Interviews with the artists and museum director show how Saamaka see their artistic practice and collective cultural memory as an affront towards state intervention meant on erasing their marronage for the sake of development.

We will then turn to Carine Schermann, and her talk “Makandal’s Ecologies: Collective Practices of Resistance in Contemporary Ayiti.” Working against the border wall that the Dominican Republic has been building against Haiti, she will analyze artistic anti-racism of Edouard Duval-Carrié’s painting The Garden’s Guardian (2016) and songs from the multilingual music album Artybonito (2021) released by the collective Azuei composed of Haitian and Dominican musicians and activists. In the context of contemporary neocolonial disputes over borders, enclosures, and access to natural resources, I argue that their aesthetic practices serve to resurrect the more-than-human figure of the pre-revolutionary maroon leader Makandal: as a generative counter-myth and symbol of hope and resistance against racism and oppressive forces.

Remaining in a shared ocean but going back more than a century, Emery Jenson will then share “Terrible Gales—Mild Trades: Atmosphere, History, and the Elementality of Race in “Benito Cereno.” Taking the temperature of Herman Melville’s weather-saturated writing, Jenson argues that air and atmosphere appear as materialities that disrupt colonial histories of racial revolution, explicitly subverting our expectations for what Edward Sugden calls “the gothic idiom of racialized revolution”: though the text narrates racial revolt, there is a conspicuous absence of any storm. Bringing the materiality of atmosphere to bear on the historicization of anticolonial violence, Melville points to the ways in which colonial attempts to cement a hegemonic truth of racial revolution are often also projects which depend on a particular vision of nature, history, and their interrelation.

Last but not least, we will have Nienke Boer, “Deep-Sea Oceanic Encounters in Esi Edugyan’s Washington Black.” In “Mining the Seas” (2022), Elizabeth DeLoughrey raises “questions about the ways in which particular kinds of literary genres and reading practices produce an extractive imaginary.” While DeLoughrey focuses on science fiction, oceanic adventure novels are also deeply imbricated in the history of this extractive imaginary. This paper examines deep-sea oceanic encounters and entanglements between a formerly enslaved boy and an octopus as imagined in Esi Edugyan’s Washington Black (2018) to think through some of the problems raised by this idea. Collecting aquatic specimens for the world’s first aquarium, Edugyan’s protagonist is poised between the power conferred by a mastery of the scientific method and his positionality as a self-emancipated former slave. Edugyan’s novel rewrites Enlightenment tropes of travel, exploration, and extraction, asking what happens when the traveller/explorer/collector is not the typical white man, but a Black boy on the run from slavery. In doing so, she shifts the narrative perspective to allow for a novel critical engagement with the extra-human-scale processes of globalisation and climate change.