The Creole Voices of West Indian Slave Narratives

Maternal slavery and Gothic melancholy in Abdülhak Hamid Tarhan’s Vâlidem (My Mother) and Mihrünnisa Hanım’s counterpoetics

“…Reconstructing the first-person accounts of women in contexts of genocide and slavery proves especially difficult (Hartman 2007;Sharpe 2010;Stoler 2002;Whitlock 2000). Nevertheless, archival sources of slave testimonies are invaluable in revealing multiplicity and hybridity at the source (Aljoe 2012;White and Burnard 2020). Trauma studies, too, grapple with the complexity of point of view and intergenerational disorders in mass trauma, not only of victims and witnesses, but also of perpetrators (and their descendants) (Felman and Laub 1992;Gilmore 2017;Schwab 2010).…”

El impensable Caribe colonial

“…Cuando empezamos a pensar en este número especial, intenté hacer un balance de cuáles eran los temas predominantes en las publicaciones de las últimas décadas que se enfocan en el periodo colonial en el Caribe, aún si estos estudios no se conceptualizan como parte de un campo específico que analiza la colonialidad en la región. Sin tratar de ser exhaustiva, en términos generales, encontré estudios sobre la representación y supervivencia de comunidades indígenas en el Caribe (Haslip-Viera, 2001;Duany, 2001;Newton, 2013;MacDonald, 2019;Farnsworth, 2019;Stone, 2019;Feliciano Santos, 2011;Sedeño-Guillén, 2019); estudios sobre piratería, contrabando y la marginación y resistencia en el Caribe durante este periodo de intensa competencia imperial en la región (Genkins, 2018;Scarano, 2011;Ponce Vázquez, 2020;Velázquez, 2023); la historia de la trata esclava y las múltiples manifestaciones del cimarronaje social, político, cultural y sexual (Eagle, 2019;Honychurch, 2017;Gibbs, 2020;Brown, 2020;Palmié, 2011;Curtis, 2011;Cummings, 2010;Walicek, 2012); el lugar de las mujeres en las sociedades coloniales caribeñas (Lalor, 2019;Aljoe, 2011); estudios sobre medicina, salud, prácticas curativas regionales (Senior, 2018;Gómez, 2018); el mundo espiritual y religioso indígena y negro en su interacción con el proyecto evangelizador español (Rodrigues, 2020;Brewer-García, 2022;Sedeño-Guillén, 2019); ambientalismo y construcción de paisajes europeos en el espacio insular caribeño (Carrasquillo, 2019;Clark, 2019;McGregor, 2011;Funes Monzote, 2011;DeLoughrey, 2007;DeLoughrey, et al, eds., 2005)…”

The Africa paradox: Locating Africa in eighteenth‐century studies

“…Though it may seem far afield, the way eighteenth‐century literary studies imagines what can and can't be said or known about Africa has been invariably shaped by this intellectual and institutional inheritance, which has led to a suspicion of the literary canon, anxieties over the limits of the discipline, and a wariness of reiterating the epistemic oppression of the Enlightenment even when the intent is to dismantle it. We've entered another critical moment in which a growing interest in making the field more “inclusive” has triggered an interrogation of the intellectual colonization that excludes autochthonous knowledge‐making methods from academic conversations (Aljoe, 2012; Allen, 2011; Huang, 2021; Koretsky, 2020; Lubey, 2020; Mallipeddi, 2014; Niccolazo, 2021a, 2021b; Pichichero, 2020; Shanafelt, 2021; Sinanan, 2022; Zuroski, 2020). And the place of “presentism” in this work has once again become a hot button issue in both academia and the media, with some historians and commentators cautioning against the dangers of shaping the story of the past to meet contemporary personal and political needs and others making the case that the past is always written in service to the present—a debate recently fueled, not coincidentally, by an opinion piece expressing reservations about Black Atlantic approaches to African history (Blain, 2022; Sweet, 2022).…”