Supervisors info:
Ασημίνα Καραβαντά, Αναπληρώτρια Καθηγήτρια, Τμήμα Αγγλικής Γλώσσας και Φιλολογίας, Εθνικό και Καποδιστριακό Πανεπιστήμιο Αθηνών
Άννα Δεσποτοπούλου, Καθηγήτρια, Τμήμα Αγγλικής Γλώσσας και Φιλολογίας, Εθνικό και Καποδιστριακό Πανεπιστήμιο Αθηνών
Σταματίνα Δημακοπούλου, Επίκουρη Καθηγήτρια, Τμήμα Αγγλικής Γλώσσας και Φιλολογίας, Εθνικό και Καποδιστριακό Πανεπιστήμιο Αθηνών
Summary:
To rethink the sea as the decolonial catalyst of the concept of the human, the vehicle of
its migrations and returns, I draw on M. NourbeSe Philip’s cycle poem Zong! As told
to the author by Setaey Adamu Boateng (2008) and Michelle Cliff’s hybrid novel Into
the Interior (2010). Philip’s highly experimental poetic synthesis critically revises a
legal document from the Black Atlantic slave trade, namely, the summary of the
Gregson vs. Gilbert case about the murder of the Africans on board of the Zong, by
imaginatively distilling the nuances and aporias that emerge from the narrative of the
case in order to untell “the story that must be told” (Philip in “Notanda”). Cliff’s
narrative symptomatically departs from a colonial past, too, to travel across the Atlantic
Ocean to the British metropolis, gradually morphing into a series of fugues that
alternately shreds apart and brings together relations, historical events, as well as
geographical places. In order to trace the “conjunctural” (Stuart Hall) affiliations
between the two texts, I approach the novus orbis of 1492 as a methodological point of
departure, drawing on Sylvia Wynter’s understanding of the beginnings of colonial
modernity as a catalyst that produces the possibility of a new autopoetic “human view.”
Through Kamau Brathwaite’s concept of “tidalectics” and its transoceanic imaginaries
and Édouard Glissant’s poetics of relation, I argue that both texts stage an alternative
politics/poetics of the kýma, steadily morphing into wordwaves [κύμενα] (Eleni
Kefala). In the first chapter, I explore in-text imaginings of relation and diaspora, as
well as of lack, excess, and contingency, suggesting that the textual representations of
the singular and the plural steadily undergo a queer metamorphosis. The second chapter
performs a catabasis into the polyvocal footnotes of both texts, where a hauntological
formation of imaginary counter-communities between the living and the dead takes
place. In the third chapter, I discuss how both writers finally turn authorship itself into
a maroon autopoetic system of encoding, letting it float among a tidal “decolonial
aestheSis” (Walter Mignolo and Rolando Vázquez) that consists of shifting languages,
registers, and typographic visual images. These textual co-inhabitancies, albeit
momentary, vulnerable, and diasporic, affirm the right of the concept of the human to
engage radically errant community-makings and imaginings, tidally revealing multiple
routes towards what Saidiya Hartman refers to as the anticipated “free state”—an
unforeseen state that carries within it a future that is always yet to-be imagined.
