Re-enchantment and Ecological Restoration in the BD adaptation of Rue Cases-Nègres by Joseph Zobel: A Path towards Coexistence

Abstract

Although France abolished slavery for the second time in 1848, the economic and social realities in the French Caribbean reflect persistent power dynamics between béké owners and black workers who are not only dispossessed of their land, but also of their bodies, perpetuating the commodification of labor-power and cycles of economic exploitation. The adaptation in bande dessinée (BD) of Zobel’s novel by Michel Bagoé and Stéphanie Destin published in 2018 by Présence Africaine marks a return to spatial subjectivity. The visualization of interactions between the human and non-human worlds, made possible through the BD format, provides us with an intimate cartography of the Martinican land that is divorced from representations of a charted landscape brought under the control of the colonizer, or white plantation owner. This article investigates forms of dispossession of land and bodies exemplified by Zobel’s depictions of the plantation society, and places them in contrast with visions of abundance and sustainability in an uncharted, re-enchanted, non-human world in the BD adaptation by Bagoé and Destin.