Reading the “living rock”
Excavating the transhistorical record of racial sedimentation in the literature of Navassa Island
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12737672 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Ashford King (Princeton University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2024 |
| Volume | 22 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 103-131 |
| Publication date | 2024-05-07 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Atlantic Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1478-8810 • E-ISSN: 1740-4649 |
| Publisher | Taylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/14788810.2024.2350303 |
| OpenAlex | W4396705587 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 27 |
This article interrogates transhistorical layers of colonial violence, and resistance to it, linked to the island of Navassa, located off the southwestern coast of Haiti. Long the subject of territorial disputes, the island and its literary entanglements point to the interconnectedness of resistance to colonialism by subalterns in the circum-Caribbean. To illustrate this, I analyze, among other texts, a sixteenth-century Spanish colonial account of a canoe journey, a nineteenth-century benevolent society pamphlet written in defense of revolting miners of guano (fertilizer made of avian excrement), a North Carolina mayor's twentieth-century local history project, and a twenty-first-century narrative by ham radio hobbyists of an expedition to the island. Ultimately, I identify thematic continuities and argue that Navassa Island and its entanglements signify as synecdoche for the (anti)colonial hemisphere, an observation which has repercussions for how we understand the semiotic charge of individual islands and their respective historiographies
Archaeology · Linguistics · Reading (process · Sediment · Sedimentation · Sociology · Anthropology · History · Indigenous Studies and Ecology · Pacific and Southeast Asian Studies · Philosophy · Religious Studies and Spiritual Practices · Geology · Paleontology
Scenes of subjection
How to Hide an Empire
The Black Jacobins
The Story of the Negro
Freedom's Mirror
Sacrifice Zones
The figure of the zombie and the memory of slavery across the Atlantic
Border and territorial disputes
Slavery and Social Death
Ceremonies of Possession in Europe's Conquest of the New World, 1492-1640
Poetics of relation
The Repeating Island
Modernity Disavowed
Guano in Their Destiny
The Unfinished Revolution
Capture Land
The Edges of Empire and the Limits of Sovereignty
The Business of Conquest
Non-Sovereign Futures
Heterotopia and Illness
| Highly cited | No |
|---|