What Is Heritable

In Marie-Elena John’s 2006 novel Unburnable, Lillian Baptiste returns to Dominica from the United States intending to confront the secrets and traumas of her maternal family line. The novel structures Lillian’s developing apprehension of who her mother and grandmother were and what they endured in late-colonial Dominica around a series of revelations regarding each woman’s imbrication within the realm of the magico-spiritual, which includes magic, Obeah and their cognates; Catholicism; spells and curses; ghosts and other spirit manifestations; and extra-sensory perception. The reader comes to understand Lillian as (and sometimes before) Lillian comes to understand herself: the last in a line of magico-spiritually powerful women whose encounters with colonial catastrophe and its heteropatriarchal, racist–classist machinations are both figured through and navigated by way of that power. Where socioeconomic and political power may conventionally be regarded as the proper subject of realist fiction and social-science inquiry, and magico-spiritual power as within the ambit of magical-realist fiction and folklore studies, Unburnable proposes worldly and magico-spiritual power as inhabiting the same material, political and psycho-social plane of Caribbean reality: as mutually entangled, co-constituting, reciprocally illuminating and, above all, dually heritable forces. In this way, the novel issues an invitation to rethink questions of power in the shadow of the Caribbean plantation and consider anew the ways in which it is, on the one hand, hoarded, bequeathed and weaponized against the vulnerable and, on the other, fluid, arcane in its sources and workings, and susceptible to insurgent counter-deployments

Art · Art history · Astronomy · Genealogy · Physics · Caribbean history, culture, and politics · History · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies · Race, History, and American Society

• Gendered Violence and Human Rights in Black World Literature and Film

  Naomi Nkealah, Obioma Nnaemeka•Gendered Violence and Human…•2021

  Añadir item

• Pedagogies of Crossing

  Mary Jane Alexander, Jack Halberstam et al.•Pedagogies of Crossing•2005

  Añadir item

• It's enough to survive through this hell to make ourselves immortal in the eyes of our descendants

  Open Access•Janelle Rodriques•Cultural Dynamics•2022

  Añadir item

• Ordinary Ethics of Spiritual Work and Healing in St. Lucia, or Why Not to Use the Term Obeah

  Marie Meudec•Small Axe A Caribbean Journal of…•2017

  Añadir item