Tropics of abjection: Figures of violence and the Afro-Caribbean semiotic

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article teases out elective affinities between Julia Kristeva’s theorization of the abject and certain (Afro-)Caribbean writers’ figurations of racialized alterity and violence in the (post)colony. It argues that whereas Kristeva relies on the tropes of refuse and the corpse to classify the volatile experience she calls abjection, Aimé Césaire, Edouard Glissant and others invoke tropes of bareness and monstrosity (i.e. zombies, cannibals) to characterize and denounce racialized violence. It argues that whereas Kristeva relies on an understanding of the abject as intimately tethered to the pre-Oedipal, writers such as Michelle Cliff and Edwidge Danticat offer us exemplary works that tend to the abject and semiotic praxis by imaginatively drawing on the pre-colonial, not least its valuations of matrilineal power and wisdom. The article registers these affinities and speculates on what the differences bespeak about violence vis-à-vis the (M)other and blackness.