Chronotopal Slave Ships, Corporeal Archives: Devoir de mémoire in Fabienne Kanor’s Humus and Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro’s las Negras

Abstract

AbstractIn Fabienne Kanor’s Humus and Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro’s las Negras, the slave ship constitutes a landmark that combines space and time: a chronotope, as Paul Gilroy articulates in The Black Atlantic. A liminal site both catalyst and witness to the collision between distinct worlds, the slave ship represents in the Afrodiasporic imaginary a new point of origin marked by colonial attempts of ontological and epistemic annihilation. Nevertheless, this motif holds the promise of renewal through a reconfiguration of spacetime that forges unforeseen alliances and fuels sociopolitical struggle. Furthermore, Arroyo Pizarro’s and Kanor’s accounts excavate the acts of resistance by Africans and Caribbean people, especially women, systematically expunged from official records. Turning instead to immaterial elements stored in the explicitly sexed body, a dynamic corporeal archive that unsettles the authority of the annals upholding dominant chronicles, these narratives amount to epistemic marronnage. The Martiniquan and Puerto Rican authors fulfil their devoir de mémoire (or obligation to remember) by elaborating a tangible (though fictional) alternative archive that withstands erasure.