Ethico-onto-epistem-ology and traumatic memories in Rivers Solomon’s The Deep and Sorrowland

Calvo-Pascual, Mónica (Universidad de Zaragoza)

Resumen: Karen Barad’s theory of agential realism and her notion of ethico-onto-epistemology, based on the inseparability of ethics, being and knowledge, disclaim any immanent distinction between the human and the nonhuman, the mind and the body, and discourse and matter. The approach to reality as discursively-materially constituted brings together critical posthumanism, agential realism and new materialism, which comprise Rosi Braidotti’s affirmative ethics and Barad’s ethics of knowing – in line with their respective ethics of becoming and ethics of entanglement. Bearing these premises in mind, this article presents an analysis of trans-species, trans-corporeal ethico-onto-epistem-ology in Rivers Solomon’s latest Afrofuturist works, The Deep (2019) and Sorrowland (2021) as the posthumanist means that enable characters to cope with their ancestors’ traumatic memories. The Deep portrays the wajinru as a new species emerging from the entangled intra-action of relata (the unborn children of pregnant Black women thrown overboard slave ships) and their medium (the ocean). Simultaneously, the history of the oppressed is presented as discursive-material and embodied in the figure of ‘the historian’, who hosts the memories of all their ancestors liberating the other wajinru from their traumatic history. In Sorrowland, with a marked posthumanist neo-materialist stance, memories adopt a quasi-gothic haunting quality but are indeed the trans-corporeal result of scientific experimentation on an African American sect for the US government’s military interests. The protagonist’s symbiosis with wild nature appears as the novel’s brand of ethical entanglement in the face of racial exploitation.

Idioma: Inglés

DOI: 10.1386/ejac_00125_1

Año: 2024

Publicado en: European journal of American culture 43, 3 (2024), 239-256
ISSN: 1466-0407

Financiación: info:eu-repo/grantAgreement/ES/DGA-FSE/H03-23R
Financiación: info:eu-repo/grantAgreement/ES/MICINN/PID2022-137627NB-I00

Tipo y forma: Article (Published version)

Área (Departamento): Área Filología Inglesa (Dpto. Filolog.Inglesa y Alema.)