Chronotropic Visions: Conclusion

Abstract

AbstractThe twenty-first-century Caribbean women writers featured in Chronotropics: Caribbean Women Writing Spacetime deconstruct androcentric approaches to spacetime inherited from Western modernity. They turn to autochthonous ontologies and epistemologies to restore a temporal connection and expand conceptions of space within and beyond the region. They promote social justice and collective healing through literary acts of archival disruption, radical remapping, and epistemic marronnage. We name this the chronotropics. Julia Alvarez, Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro, Vashti Bowlah, Dionne Brand, Erna Brodber, Maryse Condé, Nalo Hopkinson, Rita Indiana, Fabienne Kanor, Karen Lord, Kettly Mars, Pauline Melville, Mayra Montero, Shani Mootoo, Elizabeth Nunez, Ingrid Persaud, Gisèle Pineau, Krystal M. Ramroop, and Mayra Santos Febres intend to repair the present and envision a positive, sustainable future within the Caribbean and its diaspora. They redress the colonial archive and its systemic practice of exclusion, recuperate the old ways of knowing and doing as a means toward remapping spacetime, or engage with other forms of marronnage intimately connected to belief and knowledge systems, in particular spirituality and science. Their literary trajectories and the plurality of their political engagements concord in expressing chronotropic visions that foreground women’s lives and voices in concert with, not in opposition to, the natural-spiritual worlds that we inhabit.