Sea passages: cultural flows in Caribbean poetry

Neumann, Birgit; Rupp, Jan

doi:10.1080/14788810.2016.1216765

Cited by 5 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 21 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…In Philip’s performance of the poem’s opening, the gargling, gulping, shivering sounds of the repeated w’s and g’s are striking, reflecting the drowning that is rendered visually elsewhere in the poem’s experimental layout. 5 Birgit Neumann and Jan Rupp point out that “the sea is a substantial creative principle for Philip as she suspends linguistic structure […] and gives herself up to a journey that equals the situation of being at sea, with no language system to hold on to” (2016: 428). With both bodies and language at sea, the shock and pain of the events are heightened as the reader too is placed at sea in his or her encounter with the poem.…”

Section: Seaing the Past: David Dabydeen And Marlene Nourbese Philip ...mentioning

confidence: 99%

The sea and memory: Poetic reconsiderations of the Zong massacre

Howley

2019

The Journal of Commonwealth Literature

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This article examines two poems which deal directly with the events of the Zong massacre of 1781, which saw 132 Africans aboard the British slave ship Zong thrown overboard when the ship ran out of potable water. David Dabydeen’s “Turner” and Marlene NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! attempt to render the African experience of Zong in their work. Despite the similarities in subject matter and approach, there has been little substantial comparative work on these poems. Responding respectively to J. M. W. Turner’s painting The Slave Ship, which was inspired by the events, and art critic John Ruskin’s commentary on the work, as well as the legal case surrounding the massacre, Dabydeen and Philip write with the colonial past at the forefront of their minds. Using Ian Baucom’s theory of the synaptic sea, this article explores Dabydeen’s and Philip’s use of the sea as a space to remember and retell the massacre. Through its fluid and mutable nature, the sea becomes a counterpoint to the colonial record for both poets. It is both a creative and destructive space. Writing about this event is fraught with complexities for Dabydeen and Philip, but the sea emerges for both writers as a space which may accommodate the various pulls in their desire to redress the lack of African voices and depict the Zong massacre poetically.

show abstract

Section: Seaing the Past: David Dabydeen And Marlene Nourbese Philip ...mentioning

confidence: 99%

The sea and memory: Poetic reconsiderations of the Zong massacre

Howley

2019

The Journal of Commonwealth Literature

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Philip's challenge to both colonial language and male-centered canonical formations joins her to a genealogy of black feminist poets that includes Lorna Goodison, Grace Nichols, and Audre Lorde, who have theorized gender as key to understanding the Caribbean (Neumann and Rupp 2016). Philip's revisionary response may extend to Shakespeare's The Tempest, of which she asks, "what of the Black Woman?"…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…and the conversations about history, memory, race, and the idea of the human that this focus makes possible. See also Birgit Neumann and Jan Rupp's "Sea Passages: Cultural Flows in Caribbean Poetry" (Neumann and Rupp 2016) and Aaron Pinnix's "Sargassum in the Black Atlantic: Entanglement and the Abyss in Bearden, Walcott, and Philip" (Pinnix 2018), both in Atlantic Studies. 12 Nicole Gervasio reads Zong!…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“Sing the Bones Home”: Material Memory and the Project of Freedom in M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!

Fink

2020

Humanities

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

M. NourbeSe Philip’s 2008 book-length poem Zong! represents maritime materialities below the sea’s surface in relation to aesthetic geographies of the sea in the aftermath of slavery as an abyss of loss, thereby extending modernist aesthetics while offering a strategic and revisionary response to male-centered modernist writing. Keen attention into the sea as an innovating and renewing source reveals that the poem imagines the sea as a literal, formal, and thematic agent for the “decontamination” of language—which, Philip maintains, is contaminated by imperialism—and of the received history about slavery. The poem focuses its investigation on the case of the 1781 Zong massacre and the Gregson v. Gilbert maritime insurance case that arose in its wake. Zong! mourns the massacre of 150 Africans who were thrown overboard so that owners of the slave ship could collect insurance money on lost “cargo”. In conversation with Caribbean poets and thinkers, such as Grace Nichols, and African oral traditions, the poem explores forms of memory that go beyond the non-history officially afforded to the enslaved and their descendants. Throughout the poem, the sea is a site of decontamination through which Zong! stages its attempt to recover the unrecoverable. While many scholars have understandably focused on the events aboard the ship, a small number of ecocritical readings have highlighted the poem’s engagement with the materiality of the sea. Drawing on postcolonial ecocriticism and black feminist theories of the human, this article will discuss the sea as a material geography, going deeper to investigate the poem’s rarely discussed focus on biological and chemical materiality as juxtaposed to representations of black women’s flesh, arguing that it functions as a feminist provocation to both human exceptionalism and the racial boundaries of the human.

show abstract

“…For a study of the sea and "sea passages" as a topos in Caribbean poetry seeNeumann and Rupp (2016).Caribbean Spaces and Anglophone World Literatures…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Caribbean Spaces and Anglophone World Literatures

Rupp

2017

Anglia

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Caribbean writing in English highlights the call for a pluralization of world literature(s) in a double sense. It is produced in multiple Caribbean spaces, both domestic and diasporic, and it clearly stands for the extension of what used to be a rather small set of (Western) world literature. Moreover, not least as a legacy of the colonial New World/Old World distinction, visions of the world are at the heart of the Caribbean spatial imaginary as probed in many literary works. This article explores the trajectory of Caribbean spaces and Anglophone world literatures as a matter of migration and circulation, but also in terms of the symbolic translation by which experiences of movement and space are aesthetically mediated. Because of its global span across different locations Caribbean writing in English is constituted as world literature almost by definition. However, some works pursue a more circumscribed concern with domestic spaces and local artistic idioms, which affects their translatability and redefines a conventional ‘from national to world literature’ narrative.

show abstract

Sea passages: cultural flows in Caribbean poetry

Cited by 5 publications

References 21 publications

The sea and memory: Poetic reconsiderations of the Zong massacre

The sea and memory: Poetic reconsiderations of the Zong massacre

“Sing the Bones Home”: Material Memory and the Project of Freedom in M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!

Caribbean Spaces and Anglophone World Literatures

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About