Event Description
This talk introduces the letters a free black woman and an enslaved man penned for a colonial projector in eighteenth-century Saint Domingue (Haiti). Ostensibly vehicles for colonial natural history, these letters also spark with residues of the labor, knowledges, and experiences of the racialized writers who scribed them. The talk foregrounds moments where the letters describe the West Indian landscape. By reading these passages, as well as the materiality of the letters, against their "bias grain", the speaker seeks to turn description-once the colonial naturalist's tool for manufacturing a univocal nature-into an instrument of decolonial placemaking. This method of (re)description feeds on the letters' own energies to disclose para-sites: places and powers surviving at the edges of plantation enclosure.
Event Speaker
Monique Allewaert, Louis Durham Mead Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison
Event Information
Free and open to the public; registration required. For more information, please visit the event webpage.
Hosted by the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.
