kreoling sisters: (un)intimate relationships, child marriages and women spirits

The non-fiction piece, ‘kreoling sisters’, explores the overlapped histories of slavery and indenture in the Indian Ocean context, Mauritius in particular. It merges memoir writing, indenture studies and Black study and theory to discuss antiblack/antikreol racism and unfreedom during the critical historical time between the beforelife of indenture (that is slavery) and the afterlife of slavery during indenture. ‘kreoling sisters’ unearths a personal story that touches on the (un)intimacy or unofficialised intimacy between Black mothers and men of Indian descent and their Black-Indo/Kreol children. The aim is to discuss the entanglement between freedom, intimacy, slavery, antiblackness and indenture and disrupt the official, institutional, colonial and patriarchal narratives. The question the piece finally asks is how intimacy and love can exist, with the thought of what freedom could have been in the colony and could be in contemporary times. ‘kreoling sisters’ wishes to envision how Indenture studies can engage with a Black philosophy of freedom and abolition, that is the abolition of the plantation police, prison and property, inherited from colonialism.

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.

Species Thinking Without Agency: The Afterlife of Slavery, Clones, and Blurring Subject and Object in the Anthropocene

The overwhelming scale of climate change demands new ways of bridging national, cultural, and taxonomic differences. However, ecocritical frameworks that emphasise non-human agency in an attempt to make human individuals empathise with other people, other species, and the earth are haunted by the tenacious spectre of nineteenth-century classical liberalism’s characterization of personhood through specious, fragile dichotomies that can largely fall under the general rubric of agency versus determinism. The putatively opposed terms of these binaries are malleable, and control of their designation is a key element of control societies. Contemporary scholarship has identified several ways subjects bleed into objects, but, even though the ‘individual’ should theoretically collapse under its own ontological pressure in our current biopolitical age, neoliberalism largely holds onto classical liberalism’s central dogma of a person as an agential individual. I analyse the novel Never Let Me Go (2005) by Kazuo Ishiguro and its critical analyses to show how the plight to recognise agency is a prison of analysis that upholds an ideal of the individual as the bastion of personhood. As seen through the afterlife of slavery post-emancipation, those in power can discursively recognise the humanity in people formerly designated 'things' while still perpetuating systematic exploitation and dehumanisation. The metric of ‘agency’ as a unit of hope is an epistemic barrier to effective political rhetoric regarding climate change and species thinking.