In From the Wreck (2017), Australian author and environmentalist Jane Rawson imagines that her great-great-grandfather George Hills, one of the survivors of the shipwreck of the SS Admella, is rescued by a more-than-human shapeshifting being, who subsequently destabilizes his identity as a settler living in colonial South Australia. In this essay, I argue for the importance of bringing together speculative histories, the New Weird, and critical ocean studies, whose intersections are embodied in the more-than-human being as a character in Rawson's novel. I suggest that this constitutes an important critical tool for interrogating the ways in which we remember settler colonial history in Australia, especially a history that is depicted as independent of the environment and one that marginalizes the relationship between the human and the more-than-human. In this way, I demonstrate how the New Oceanic Weird as a genre can highlight reciprocity on an individual and a collective level to emphasize the entangled and reciprocal histories between the human and the more-than-human alongside those of settler colonialism and environmental destruction.
While M. NourbeSe Philip is often regarded as a black-feminist language poet, her concern about place is equally significant and deserves more critical attention. This essay reads Philip as an Afro-Caribbean poet of place and ponders the geographical implications of her abstract, black-feminism-inspired poetry. Specifically, I focus on her reasoning about "center" and how it engenders formal or verbal matrices in her poems. For Philip, "center" denotes not only the metropole dominating the periphery, but also a place of sufficient being, wholeness, and self-becoming. The second sense of "center" marks the telos of her poetics of place, which, I argue, consists in prevalent and ambiguous uses of the preposition "in" in works like She Tries and Zong!. Center entails an inwardness in response to colonialism-begotten displacement, and Philip's choreography of "in" affords possibilities for conceptualizing the "placedness" of the Caribbean as well as blackness and black femininity in place.
The letters exchanged between Ignatius Sancho and Laurence Sterne in 1766 have encountered considerable attention, as have those passages in Sterne's works that seemingly engage with antislavery discourse. Some critics suggest these passages fail to address slavery directly; Sterne, in turn, has been viewed as readily capitalizing on his connection with Sancho to promote a philanthropic image that his writings do not support, and even to exploit it for financial gain. This article suggests a recalibration, partly based on the chronology of this exchange and its first public appearance in 1775. It argues that a richer understanding of Sancho's and Sterne's reception histories, and especially the role played by the eighteenth-century press in recirculating reviews of and excerpts from this exchange, helps to establish a more nuanced approach toward how the public image and the texts of both writers were subsequently incorporated into antislavery and Abolitionist debates.
In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, 3000-8000 Africans and African descendants from Brazil relocated to the Bight of Benin and developed a very successful settlement system in what is today Benin, Ghana, Nigeria, and Togo. Kangni Alem's Les Enfants du Bresil (2017) and Florent Couao-Zotti's Les Fantomes du Bresil (2006) portray these Brazilian returnee communities, also known as Aguda, who wielded considerable economic and political power. The analysis mobilizes Christin Hess's concept of reverse diaspora to reveal the complexity of returnee identity and the ambiguous notion of home. Both novels mediate the diasporic returnee experience using specific writing strategies, such as diversity of narrative voices, intertextuality, and a nonlinear structure. Moreover, Alem and Couao-Zotti infuse their novels with historical and ethnological elements that are transformed by literature through what Alem calls "material imagination." This approach showcases the power of fiction to recover history and reconstruct collective narratives.
Teju Cole's Open City is one of several recent postcolonial novels that narrate the refugee crisis and the threats to nonhuman species in a way that takes seriously the parallels and interspecies relationships. I am interested in the extent to which novels that explore kinships across boundaries of kind manage to make a space for the nonhuman in the anthropocentric form of the novel. In the case of Open City, I argue that Cole's figural approach offers a means of formalizing the human representation of nonhuman others as a problem and allows readers to make connections across species boundaries even as the novel raises the specter of moral stasis through the cosmopolitan narrator's failure to take an ethical stance with respect to those in search of refuge, human or not. This failure is a human one, and in offering an anatomy of such a failure, Cole invites scrutiny of cosmopolitanism as much as of the novel form's anthropocentrism.
