Mare Mortis: Blackness, ecology, and “kinlessness” in Henry Neville’s The Isle of Pines

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay examines the ocean as a site that both fractures and sutures kinship models to delineate black bodies from and against white bodies. Bringing the oceanic turn to Henry Neville’s The Isle of Pines (1668), I investigate how aqueous interaction forcibly disassociates the black body from kin and positions the ocean as meting out punishment. Immersion and drowning become death sentences that associate racialized vice on the isle and segregate black from non-black kin, embodying what Hortense Spillers has called “kinlessness.” By uniting black feminisms, the oceanic turn, and eighteenth-century cultural studies, this essay examines how race and kinship are environmentally aligned in Neville’s satire. This constellation of blackness, ecology, and kinship envisions the fraught, fractured, and messy mingling of racialized and ecological un/becoming within depictions of early modern utopia.