Drawing on an archive of nearly three hundred Anansi tales collected between 1814 and 1935, this talk documents the animist multinaturalism at stake in Jamaican Anansi tales. This form of multinaturalism contests colonial conceptions of nature as well as the ideas about language that follow on colonial nature. Using the power of puns, metaphors, rhyme, and performance, Anansi and other insect avatars convert colonial nature into abolition ecologies. More broadly, the constellation of problems and powers associated with West Indian bugs (imperceptibility, smallness, shapeshifting, co-metabolism, environmental change), informs a situated decolonial knowledge inspired by insects’ navigation of their environments.
Monique Allewaert is Associate Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She works at the intersections of eighteenth and nineteenth-century hemispheric American colonialisms, the environmental humanities, literary and cultural studies, and science studies. She is the author of Ariel’s Ecology: Plantations, Personhood, and Colonialism in the American Tropics (2013). Her current book project Luminescence follows insect avatars through eighteenth-century Caribbean natural history, story, riddles, song, and poetry to elaborate counter-plantation knowledges and aesthetics.
Date | Time
January 25, 2023 | 12:15 – 1:30 PM [PST]
Free and open to the public
Venue | Location
Humanities Building 1, Room 210
University of California, Santa Cruz
Remote Option
RSVP by 11 AM on Wednesday, January 25, you will receive the Zoom link and password at 11:30 AM the day of the colloquium.