Land as an Indigenous Archive in Yvonne Vera’s The Stone Virgins

Abstract

The article reads The Stone Virgins as a text underlined by an Indigenous poetics that situates the land as a speaking subject and an archive of memory. Its critical foci are African feminist conceptions of the entanglement of human and nonhuman matter and their implications for current conceptions of the archive. The article suggests that, rather than incorporating into the postcolonial national archive the excluded voices of women and ethnic minorities, The Stone Virgins makes legible minority practices of memory making that the archive does not recognize. To account for these practices and their literary representation, the article draws a comparison between the novel’s poetics of land and Indigenous poetics across other Anglophone spheres. The comparison is based in the convergence of Black and Indigenous conceptions of the coconstitutionality of the human and nonhuman. The comparison provides a new critical model for reading postcolonial aesthetic formations that engage nonhuman beings. It furthermore speaks to larger conversations regarding the “ontological turn” of criticism oriented to animist and new materialisms, as it addresses a mode of reading the land in African writing attuned to Indigenous systems of knowledge.