Inventories, Catalogs, and Venuses: Excavating the Archive in Robin Coste Lewis’s Voyage of the Sable Venus
This article discusses archival and memorial work in the poetry collection Voyage of the Sable Venus by Robin Coste Lewis. I track Lewis’s experimental poetic strategies to confront and unsettle archival silences and erasures when it comes to Black female bodies in the archive of Transatlantic slave...
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| Veröffentlicht in: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/babel, |
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| Format: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Sprache: | Anglais |
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Babel
2020
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| Online Zugang: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Zusammenfassung: | This article discusses archival and memorial work in the poetry collection Voyage of the Sable Venus by Robin Coste Lewis. I track Lewis’s experimental poetic strategies to confront and unsettle archival silences and erasures when it comes to Black female bodies in the archive of Transatlantic slavery. These strategies resonate with Christina Sharpe’s wake work and Saidiya Hartman’s discussion of an ethical engagement with the archive. By striving to individuate the figure of the Black woman in history, and by predicating memorial work on a collective engagement with the past, Lewis paves the way for a radically new articulation of Black womanhood that shatters and goes beyond the hold of the archive. |
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