A Shoal on a New Shore
Afro-Indigeneity and Multilingualism in M. NourbeSe Philip's Zong
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 5115573 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Caitlin Simmons (0000-0002-1599-3995, Southern University and A&M College, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2023 |
| Volume | 23 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 68-91 |
| Publication date | 2023-03-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Diaspora A Journal of Transnational Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1044-2057 • E-ISSN: 1911-1568 |
| Publisher | University of Toronto Press Inc. (UTPress) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.3138/diaspora.23.1.2023.02.01 |
| OpenAlex | W4379791985 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 9 |
In the eight sections of her 2008 book-length poem Zong!, Afro-Canadian poet NourbeSe Philip breaks apart the representational, colonialist, and objectifying language of an archived insurance document, repurposes it, and transforms it into poetry that establishes new methods of reading that resist the semantic logic of slavery's necropolitical archive. While many critics focus on the de(con)structive nature of Philip's response to the murder of 133 enslaved persons at sea, I assert that Zong! is ultimately an antinomian text of recovery and reconstruction by virtue of her inclusion of multiple Indigenous African tongues. In doing so, I turn to Tiffany Lethabo King's exploration of the "shoal"-a liminal spot of convergence between the sea and land that connects the Black Atlantic to Indigenous violence-to establish that Zong! is more than a text of the Black Atlantic. Through the inclusion of thirteen Afro-Indigenous languages, I argue that Philip creates a convergence between the Black Atlantic and Indigeneity, in a new Afro-Indigenous shoal. This expands King's shoal to the shores of Africa, demonstrating that these multiethnic convergences exceed an Americanist approach
Art · Indigenous · Liminality · Literature · Poetry · Shoal · Shore · Sociology · Theology · Virtue · Anthropology · Caribbean and African Literature and Culture · History · Latin American and Latino Studies · Philosophy · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies · Ecology · Geology · Oceanography
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |