Poetics and Politics of the Chronotropics: Introduction

Abstract

AbstractTwenty-first-century Caribbean women’s writing evidences an urge to start afresh, to transcend the lingering legacy of enslavement, coloniality, and patriarchy and reverse the damage of the extractive logic that rules an asymmetrical global order. This pan-Caribbean volume presents alternative conceptions of spacetime from across the region and its diaspora, what we call the “chronotropics.” Stemming from chronos (time) and tropos, “a turn,” this term does not merely designate a tropical chronotope, but points to a vocation for social justice and collective healing. The writers gathered here deconstruct the androcentric, western modern understanding of space as delimited, privatized, tamed, and exploitable and of time as quantified, linear, singular, and teleological. They propose instead a poetics and politics of the chronotropics that envisions the Caribbean landscape and temporality as anticolonial, gender inclusive, pluralistic, and non-anthropocentric. Their literary practices perform archival disruption, radical remapping, and epistemic marronnage.Chronotropics: Caribbean Women Writing Spacetime offers critical perspectives on 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.