Accounts Unpaid, Accounts Untold: M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! and the Catalogue

Fehskens, Erin M.

doi:10.1353/cal.2012.0043

Cited by 39 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 13 publications

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“…"This chain of names," Fehskens offers, "bears witness to what remains unrecoverable, an historical record of Africans on board the Zong" (2012,415). In this way, Philip forces her readers to account not only for the violence aboard the Zong but also for the violence of archival erasure (Austen 2011, Fehskens 2012, Hartman 2008, Lambert 2016, McKittrick 2014. Drift moves us between, forces us to confront illogic as we drift from sound to sound, borne on the invisible waves of Philip's literary imaginary.…”

Section: Atlantis Journalmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Impossibility of a Future in the Absence of a Past: Drifting in the In-Between

Boon¹,

Lahey²

2019

atlantis

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Section: Atlantis Journalmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Impossibility of a Future in the Absence of a Past: Drifting in the In-Between

Boon¹,

Lahey²

2019

atlantis

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“…Phrases from two-page summary such as “want of water” and “perils of the sea” (210–211) return throughout the text as increasingly disintegrated ideas, the words themselves spaces across the pages of the poem. Erin Fehskens suggests that the spaces which tear apart Gregson v Gilbert in the poem “stand in for the bodies that disrupt the surface of the sea” (2012: 408). Their presence is inscribed on the sea as much as on the page: “life i | t self they wr | ite on water” (153).…”

Section: Memory At Sea: Zong! Resisting Meaningmentioning

confidence: 99%

The sea and memory: Poetic reconsiderations of the Zong massacre

Howley

2019

The Journal of Commonwealth Literature

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This article examines two poems which deal directly with the events of the Zong massacre of 1781, which saw 132 Africans aboard the British slave ship Zong thrown overboard when the ship ran out of potable water. David Dabydeen’s “Turner” and Marlene NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! attempt to render the African experience of Zong in their work. Despite the similarities in subject matter and approach, there has been little substantial comparative work on these poems. Responding respectively to J. M. W. Turner’s painting The Slave Ship, which was inspired by the events, and art critic John Ruskin’s commentary on the work, as well as the legal case surrounding the massacre, Dabydeen and Philip write with the colonial past at the forefront of their minds. Using Ian Baucom’s theory of the synaptic sea, this article explores Dabydeen’s and Philip’s use of the sea as a space to remember and retell the massacre. Through its fluid and mutable nature, the sea becomes a counterpoint to the colonial record for both poets. It is both a creative and destructive space. Writing about this event is fraught with complexities for Dabydeen and Philip, but the sea emerges for both writers as a space which may accommodate the various pulls in their desire to redress the lack of African voices and depict the Zong massacre poetically.

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“…33 Other histories of The Zong are also unclear about the number of Africans killed: 150, 133, 132, and 123. 34 The death tabulation is, as I read it, best understood as a range of numbers gathered from many texts and sources. The inability to count the dead allows us to doubt knowable data, and a singular analytical frame, and therefore open ourselves up to another set of questions and numbers that follow alongside and after The Zong.…”

Section: Vignette 1: Historymentioning

confidence: 99%

Diachronic loops/deadweight tonnage/bad made measure

McKittrick

2015

cultural geographies

114

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This article is a relational conversation nested in black studies, science studies of blackness and race, geographies of knowledge, and black creative text. The overlying purpose is to address how the social production of biologically determinist racial scripts -which extend from a biocentric conception of the human -can be dislodged by bringing studies of blackness in/and science into conversation with autopoietics, black Atlantic livingness, weights and measures, and poetry.

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Accounts Unpaid, Accounts Untold: M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! and the Catalogue

Cited by 39 publications

References 13 publications

The Impossibility of a Future in the Absence of a Past: Drifting in the In-Between

The Impossibility of a Future in the Absence of a Past: Drifting in the In-Between

The sea and memory: Poetic reconsiderations of the Zong massacre

Diachronic loops/deadweight tonnage/bad made measure

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