Abyssal geographies

An ethnographic reply. A commentary on David Chandler and Jonathan Pugh's ‘Abyssal geography’

Bibliographic Data

ID11620112
AuthorsAdom Philogene Heron (0000-0002-2513-7850, Department of Anthropology Goldsmiths University of London London UK, corresponding author)
Year2023
Volume44
Issue2
Pages218-223
Publication date2023-05-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueSingapore Journal of Tropical Geography (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0129-7619 • E-ISSN: 1467-9493
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/sjtg.12480
OpenAlexW4372295408
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited16

In the spirit with which this collegial call and response invites my participation, I offer this reply to Chandler and Pugh's (2023) powerful provocation.†† I order my remarks as follows. First, some issues I have. I share these concerns to open lines of further thought rather than encourage analytic closure. Second, I attempt to briefly take up the authors’ analytic offering and ‘turn’ it towards a set of ethnographic questions located in Dominica, Eastern Caribbean. I am ill qualified to offer significant comment on the contribution of this paper to an arena referred to as ‘contemporary critique’—high thought emerging from the American academy. My reading of Morten, Spillers and da Silva are limited, even if I know Benítez-Rojo's and Christina Sharpe's work rather better. I would not be so boastful as to even suggest that I understood all of what the paper was getting at. Yet, I will work with what I have grasped and go from there. What I might offer is a vantage, grounded in ethnographic practice, reading and place—situated along this archipelago—and consider how the claims made might take purchase in the Antilles. Since my ethnographic praxis is oriented towards groundwork, dialogues and analytic modes that emerge from ordinary human interaction, the stuff of daily life, I situate and make sense of this meta-analytic— ‘abyssal geographies’—in relation to the everyday Caribbean worlds with which I am familiar. I have been thinking with the works of Brathwaite (1970; 1996) (of nearby Barbados) and Glissant (1997; 2011; 2021 with Hans Ulrich Obrist) (of neighbouring Martinique) almost daily, for the past few years, attempting to see how their concepts take hold in Dominica; to understand relations between humans, land, sea and hurricanes in this island. Waitikubuli (‘tall is her body’, is how Dominica's indigenous Kalinago peoples knew their island), the last in the Antilles to be colonized, a maroon and indigenous stronghold for centuries. I am a grandchild of this place; a place I have been visiting for a short lifetime; a place I have been returning to ethnographically for a decade. Thinking about the exercise of grounding theory here, I have been sitting, for instance, with Glissant's notion ‘relational complicity with the new earth and sea and cosmos’ for those deposited on Caribbean plantations (Glissant, 2011: 12)—asking how Dominicans made homes and fashioned lives in close relation to the elements and their animate landscape. I have sat with Brathwaite's notion of the foundational catastrophe of the middle passage (in McSweeney, 2005), from which Caribbean creativity emerges, an archetype for each catastrophe that would follow. I am interested by what survival might mean in Dominica, and these authors lend cosmological clues that I read in dialogue with Dominican patterns of world making in the hurricane's path/wake. It is with a similar approach that I have tried to work out what the ‘abyssal geographies’ frame might contribute (a) to our understandings of Caribbean worlds1 or (b) these authors’ (‘abyssal thinkers’) bodies of thought. The reflections that follow—far from making general, region-crossing claims—emerge from a small island, part of a wide and varied archipelago called the Antilles, itself intimately connected to a vast planet beyond its waters

Abyssal zone · Autoethnography · Ethnography · Sociology · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Anthropology · Geology · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · Oceanography · Water Governance and Infrastructure

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