Writing beyond Redress: Slavery and the Work of Literature

Abstract

Writing beyond Redress: Slavery and the Work of Literature is a comparative study of literary works by Afro-Caribbean writers which illuminate the entanglements of slavery, imperialism, and imprisonment. Spanning a period from the early nineteenth century to the early twenty-first century, the project traces in literary writing a dialectic of confinement and emancipation in the long fight against the system of slavery and its attendant ideologies. Each chapter focuses on a primary text that foregrounds either a specific site of confinement during slavery, or an instantiation of its afterlife: the prison (The Memoir of General Toussaint Louverture, by Louverture himself), the sugar plantation (Autobiografía de un esclavo, Juan Francisco Manzano), the isolated peasant village (Gouverneurs de la rosée, Jacques Roumain), and the immigration detention center (Brother, I’m Dying, Edwidge Danticat). Calling us to rethink the labor involved in the act of writing and the stakes—including physical risk—of speaking from within and against systems of oppression, these texts illuminate the inhibitions of speech and activity that slavery and the institutions that arose in its aftermath were designed to maintain. Confronting, too, the often dissimulating uses of language by the dominant society, these texts reimagine the potency of the written word to combat social wrongs and to forge other possible forms of social being. While writing alone cannot redress the damages of slavery, at the same time, writing must be claimed for the ongoing work of emancipation.